Beijing

Now onto China where blogging is verboten, so I am writing this from Japan, where the Great Firewall of China cannot stop us.

Beijing is much bigger and smoggier than I imagined; each block is half a mile long and you can hardly see past it. It's a mix of construction dust, industrial and engine exhaust and sand from the gobi desert, which acc to the Lonely Planet is approaching at 3km a year and will one day engulf the city.

The buildings are either ultra-modern, with squiggles and off-set angles like architectural cartoons, or soviet-style blocks. The old alleyways, or hutongs, in between are colourful, one-story slum-like areas but they are being cleared fast or gentrified by ex-pats. We toured one with a tuk tuk driver who showed us houses with big bricks for important folk, little bricks for the poor, dragon-topped doorposts that were defaced during the Cultural Revolution, and some that hadn't, whose heads we were told to rub for good luck.

Our hotel window looked onto a construction site, with workers welding girders eight floors up in the air, sometimes in the middle of the night.

Tiananmen Square was our first major stop. It is enclosed with railings and overlooked by skinny armed guards standing to attention under green umbrellas. It's a bit eery and supposed to be full of plain clothes policemen, but the atmosphere is softened by an ice cream van and hordes of Chinese tourists. Chairman Mau's pickled body is on view in a mausoleum at the back of the square; we didn't buy a ticket, although C managed to buy a nice wristwatch with a waving chairman hand on it. Nothing subversive, officer, it's for telling the time, honest.

North of the square is the Gate of Heavenly Peace, an impressive red monument from which the great helmsman proclaimed the Communist Chinese People's Republic in 1949, and the entrance to the Forbidden City, where The Last Emperor was filmed.

The Forbidden City use to house the royal household and thousands of concubines and eunochs (apparently the eunochs often ended up running things, but it was a risky business as half of them didn't survive the snip, yikes!). Ordinary people were executed if they tried to sneak in, and even ministers and dignitaries had to touch their head on the ground nine times (kowtow), so it felt great to be trampling through with an audio guide.

A moat surrounds the complex of courtyards, with pavilions ranked by the number of dragons on each corner. Symbols of power are everywhere and lots of steps, which early emperors were carried up (the last one had things modified so he could get round on a bicycle). The buildings felt more about power than spirituality, a contrast to Angkor Wat.

Outside, we climbed the hill in Jingshan Park and C insisted on having our photo taken in emperor costumes. C was finally a Princess! The less said about this the better, but at least we made some friends of an English couple, Mac and Lucie, who were watching the whole performance.

Food and drink highlights: visit to a famous Peking Duck restaurant with Mac and Lucie, where we ate duck hearts and deer tongues and authentic Peking duck from Peking (bird number 419,923 according to our certificate). A visit to the Temple of Heaven Park and dish called “The Palace Explodes the Diced Chicken”. An evening in bar area Houhoi, where C bought a panda bear hat, and we were invited to an underground bar for “hip hop and fine dining”, which turned out to be transvestite pole dancing.

We saw the impressively dusty Bird's Nest stadium and toured the aquatic centre, now a tourist trap for merchandising, and toured the 798 Beijing contemporary art area, a kind of Brick Lane district created from an old factory.

Something else happened in China too, but that merits a separate entry.

G