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Tag: beijing (clear tag)
Not quite a highlight a day. Lucky I didn't make any promises :D
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| Tiananmen Square: the centre of Beijing and the heart of China. The square is named after Tiananmen, the Gate of Heavenly Peace and the north entrance to the Forbidden City. It is 440,000 square metres in size and it is the largest open-urban square in the world. We visited the square early on a Saturday morning and the place was already bustling with Chinese and Western tourists alike. Such a busy tourist attraction is obviously an irresistible magnet for the hawkers. The usual postcards were on sale, but here we could also buy Chairman Mao watches, books on the teachings of Mao and famous phrases of Mao. It was here that we first used our most valuable Chinese phrase, "Bu yao" (boo ya). It means, "I do not want" and it was well-worn by the end of our journey. Many Chinese people make the pilgrimage to the square to pay their respects to Mao. After his death he was embalmed and his corpse is now on display in the Chairman Mao Memorial Hall for all to see (from 9.30am to 11.30am - 7 days a week). The line often snakes for hundreds of metres and is filled with the believers and the curious. Poor Mao, he wanted to be cremated and now he suffers the indignity of being gawked at by thousands of people every day. Although, I too wanted to be one of the gawkers, but unfortunately time did not permit. In 1989, I avidly followed the Tiananmen Square protests in the media. The world watched in horror as the movement was quashed and we were shocked as information regarding the event was suppressed. I too was fixated and even did a school project on the protests. I expected to be moved by my visit to Tiananmen. However, it hardly registered on my emotional radar. It was hard to imagine it filled with a million protesting students. It was hard to envisage that lone protester standing in the path of a huge tank. Actually, it's hard to get an idea of just how big the square really is and it all feels a bit cold and clinical. For the heart of a country, it felt, well, heartless. |
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Did you know?... In January 2006, Google agreed to censor their mainland China site, Google.cn, to remove information about the 1989 Tiananmen Square Protest, as well as other topics such as Tibetan independence, the banned spiritual movement Falun Gong and the political status of Taiwan, confirming that Tiananmen is still an issue the government wants to avoid. In September 2006, Wikipedia refused to censor it's Chinese content site, resulting in it being blocked by the Chinese government. The Chinese Wikipedia's article on the Tianamen Square protests and massacre continues to exist. I wonder if FuShMuSh will be blacklisted? |
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14th Sep 2006, 11:11
tags: china
travel
tianamen_square
beijing
intrepid
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