Madras Ramblings

Call me a snob tourist. I go to a place I'm familiar with, Ooty let's say, and look down with more condescension than is really appropriate at those doing Ooty by the book. The Lake: check. Botanical gardens: check. Doddabetta: check. The spot where actor x embraced actress y in film z: check. Tourism by numbers; tourism by the book; tourism meant to assure your neighbours and relatives that yes, you saw everything the guidebooks said there was to see.

And so here I was in Beijing. Tiananmen Square: check. The Forbidden City: check. The Great wall: check. And justifying ticking off boxes on a checklist by the fact that I wouldn't be visiting again anytime soon. But isn't that how everyone justifies by-the-numbers tourism? And isn't there a reason why those tourist checklists exist?

I'd been to Shanghai, in 2011, to attend a conference. Shanghai isn't a tourist city; it is a place where people do business. Yes, the Bund has a series of well-preserved art deco buildings, the Pudong skyline is something to behold, and the city boasts a fine museum, but a tourist city it isn't. Even the murky river is a vehicle for commerce. The city's aesthetics are all in the service of commerce. Not so Beijing. And, most emphatically, not so Xian.

Our flight from Hong Kong was delayed due to bad weather in Beijing. It was murky when we landed and we assumed that the weather was responsible. We learned the next day that the famous Beijing pollution was at least partly to blame.

Beijing awes with its sheer size and scale, starting with the airport. We had to take a train to get from the immigration counters to the baggage claim area, and the ride must have been a good kilometre or more. The drive into the city is on broad expressways. We thought of Chennai and felt like country bumpkins visiting the big city.

The area around our hotel could have been in any first world country. Fancy malls, luxury goods outlets, Audis and BMWs on the streets.

Beijing West Station, though, was large, very crowded and distinctly second world (unlike the posh and super modern airport). That said, it was functional and, given the crowds, surprising orderly and clean. The crowds using the loos are as large as any in India, but the olfactory assault was much less in evidence. There was no incentive to search the neighbourhood for a suitable wall/tree to commit nuisance against.

The uncrowded platform

Our tickets were checked against our passports (you need an ID to buy a train ticket, and the ID number is printed on the ticket) and our baggage scanned. You cannot get into the concourse without the ticket/baggage check. The crowds notwithstanding, the process was efficient. We then found that each train is assigned one of several large waiting areas, each with stalls selling snacks, newspapers and magazines and the like. The passengers varied in looks from country bumpkin to sophisticate, their luggage from Samsonite to cloth bundles slung over shoulders. Apart from eateries serving Chinese dishes, McDonalds and KFC had outlets, and we settled for the known over the unknown: McDonalds.

There were trains to various cities in Western China including Lhasa.

Our train was eventually announced about half an hour prior to departure and we queued up for another ticket check before being allowed onto the platform where our train was waiting.

A simple idea this: passengers (and only passengers) are allowed onto their designated platform a short while before their train departs. This means that the platforms themselves are uncrowded, that people can get into trains without pushing and shoving and, perhaps best of all, that the platforms are clean.

It occurred to me that the station had been designed keeping this flow of passengers in mind. Someone, somewhere, had thought about this, perhaps studied stations and airports both in China and elsewhere (other than India!), and worked out one way of handling large numbers of passengers.

Our own Central Station, grand edifice though it is, is a nineteenth century building functioning without alterations in the twenty first century. While new airports are coming up around the country, our stations remain firmly anchored in the past.

Our train, the Z19 non-stop to Xian, was nothing fancy (something between our 1st and 2nd AC in terms of amenities) but clean, well maintained and functional. There were friendly nods from our co-passengers. They spoke no English, we spoke no Chinese, and, nods done with, we settled down to mind our own business. The 1200 km was covered overnight in 11 hours and the ride was smooth; we left exactly on time and got in to Xian exactly on time. Impressive. There were no unscheduled stops: no waking up in the middle of the night to find the train stationary and the horn blaring plaintively.

Our first sight of Xi'an - the old city wall abutting the station!

Xian, the capital of China from around 220 BC to around 900AD, is a mixture of the old, the very old, plenty of tired remnants of the Mao era, and the distinctly new. A well-maintained Ming era city wall (ringed with gardens and a moat) surrounds central Xian, and this was the first thing we saw as we left the station. Trees line the roads and while the bustle and traffic of a large city was always present, there was equally this feeling of being in a human city. After murky Beijing, it was a pleasure to be in bright, clear sunshine. And perhaps because of the sunshine, the people looked more cheerful as well. I had read about aggressive touts lying in wait for tourists, but getting to the authorized taxi stand was painless. There was the obligatory five minutes of mutual incomprehension, but the driver eventually figured out where we wanted to go and dropped us off at the hotel.

The old and the new

Clamped! And on the sidewalk

Walking around, one got the distinct feeling that today's pleasant Xian might soon lose its character and become an anonymous large modern city. The main roads are already those of a modern city: broad, with huge sidewalks (used quite frequently to park cars!) and manicured trees, bordered by monumental buildings including offices, shopping malls and, in some places, well preserved examples of communist era grandeur.

Get off these avenues, though, and you enter a different Xian: smaller scaled, more intimate, shabbier and more human. It is a bit like taking a trip back in time, but time measured in decades rather than centuries. You see the Xian of the '80s, then, as you poke your head into a smaller alleyway, the '70s and perhaps even earlier. Little restaurants and shops line the streets, the trees give more shade, there is the occasional bit of broken pavement and uncleared rubbish and there are people standing in the doorways and chatting. Not quite India, but we felt at home.

Lunch time worker recreation?

Every now and then, though, something distinctly Chinese happened. We paused outside a restaurant attempting to make sense of the menu when loudspeakers suddenly burst into life. The music was familiar, and it took us a moment to place it: the Gangnam Style. Next, a bunch of waiters in uniform stepped out and started a synchronized dance on the pavement. We gaped, but no one else around seemed to think there was anything unusual in all of this, and carried on with whatever they were doing. A couple of days later, we again saw something similar: a bunch of elderly street workers doing stylized dance steps on a busy pavement, this time to revolutionary music from the Mao era. Once more, passers by carried on as though this was completely normal.

Did you know that?

Dayan Pagoda

Xian was where the silk route began, and its best known sights reflect that history. A couple of kilometres south of the city walls, surrounded by a large granite plaza, fountains and shopping malls with mock traditional facades, is the Dayan Pagoda, also known as the Big Wild Goose Pagoda. In the early seventh century, a monk named Hiuen Tsiang (Xuanzang) made his way along the silk route to Taxila and thence eastward to Gaya, looking for original Buddhist scriptures. The pagoda was built on his return to house these scriptures. The 64 meter high structure would be impressive under any circumstance. The fact that the wherewithal to build something like this existed 1400 years ago, and the fact that it has survived wars, earthquakes and the depredations of age make it even more special. Yes, it has been repaired and restored over the years. But today's structure is, in essence, what was originally built in the Tang dynasty.

Our first views, with the newly added fountains

The walls of the monastery with added historical carvings

Goose bump moment. Here was a connection between India and China

The massive bell

Equally massive drum

We climbed up and were rewarded with fine views of the modern city. Only two manuscript fragments (in a script we could not decipher) are displayed in the pagoda; the rest (those that have survived the years) are now housed in museums.

The manuscript fragment

A functioning Buddhist monastery lies adjacent to the towers. A couple of buildings were being restored. A fair crowd of respectful worshippers moved through the buildings, offering incense and prayers at the numerous altars. Godless communism in China appears to be increasingly tolerant of religion. Or perhaps it was just another manifestation of Chinese pragmatism: do whatever it takes to bring the tourists in.

Something had been bothering me as we walked around the pagoda and its surroundings. This clearly was an important structure. Why, then, had it been built well outside the city walls?

We got the answer later that afternoon in the basement of the Xian museum. A large wooden reconstruction of the city as it was in the ninth century occupied much of a large basement room. The city then boasted more than a million inhabitants and the Tang era city walls enclosed a much larger area than the surviving Ming era wall.