My First Visit into Beijing

A few weeks ago, I went on my first foray into what I consider my first real trip into China. I visited Beijing – the capital of the People’s Republic of China.

Although I have been to Hong Kong countless times, and also ventured over the border into Shenzhen, I consider neither of these cities to be true visits to the PRC. 

Hong Kong is a former British colony that is still governed as a separate state, where freedom of speech and many British laws still upheld. Shenzhen, although it sits just inside the confines of the communist regime, is simply multicultural mish mash of different peoples, and a hub of retail and trade much like Hong Kong.

Beijing is China. It is the capital, it is where the country’s government is headquartered, it is where many of China’s iconic historical monuments lie.

Upon arriving in the city, I was met with the bitter coldness of the Northern China winter – a stark contrast to the twenty-five degrees warmth I was enjoying in Hong Kong before the three and half hour flight to the capital.

The first thing I noticed was the sheer size of the city. To put it quite simply, everything was huge. Like many of the cities in the United States, Beijing is built on a grid system. There are long, straight roads, intersected by wide, sweeping boulevards comprised of up to twelve lanes.

Contrast this with Hong Kong, where the roads are narrow, sometimes winding, and often confusing, much like the streets of London.

Beijing is a megacity. A metropolis. Nearly twice the size of London and with a population of twenty million.

A city population that is almost the same size as the population of Australia.

And it wasn’t just the roads and the amount of people that were huge. Many of the historical monuments within the city were on a similarly grand scale.

Tiananmen Square could have easily accommodated several jumbo jets; The Forbidden City took us three hours to walk; The Summer Palace could have swallowed New York’s Central Park; The Great Wall was simply epic; and even the Olympic Park exuded sheer vastness.

I was particularly impressed by the Forbidden City and The Great Wall. These were structures that were built hundreds of years ago, without the aid of mechanical machinery and without the calculations from computers. These impressive monuments which, although are well known now across most of the world, are still astounding to witness close up.

I have been to many Asian destinations in my time. Japan has some extremely pretty historical sites, as does Taiwan. Thailand as well.  But the awe-inspiring size of some the structures in Beijing and China trumps all of them.

What also intrigued me, was the noticeable differences between these people of the north and the Chinese I was accustomed to in Hong Kong and the south.

Physically, northern Chinese are taller. Research has shown that the difference in height between northern Chinese and southern Chinese, is greater than the difference in height between Northern Europeans and Southern Europeans.  

In terms of cuisine, I noticed an absence of noodles in nearly all the meals we had – a staple in Hong Kong and southern China. Dumplings and bread were far more prevalent, and potatoes even made an appearance several times, particularly in the Mongolian restaurant we went to. This perhaps partly explains why Northern Chinese are taller than their southern counterparts, along with the climate.

Northern Chinese are also far louder than people in Hong Kong, which isn’t exactly a city of angels either. Prior to visiting Mainland China, I had been warned about the differences in manners I would experience.

Although Hong Kongers can be somewhat more direct than the British, this did not prepare me for some of the things I experienced in Beijing. The idea of queuing simply did not exist in many of the tourist areas we went to. Pushing and shoving is the law as was spitting on the ground and in the toilets.

The vast majority of toilets are also still traditional squat style toilets with fairly atrocious standards of hygiene. In the few western style toilets we did use, my mum noticed two foot prints on the seat – obviously a person before hand had stood on the seat and tried to use it as a squat toilet.  Thankfully, we witnessed none of this in our nice, comfortable five star Hilton Hotel.

Despite its rapid economic development, which has transformed the country from a society of peasants to a modern state with an impressive GDP, China is still a land of stark contrasts. This is particularly illustrated in Beijing where looming financial glass structures, and high-class hotels sit side by side with worn down tower blocks.

The shopping districts of Beijing can easily rival those of any western European city for choice and class. But venture down a few streets and you will be hounded by desperate locals, dressed in worn down clothes trying to sell you tourist memorabilia in order to make ends meet.

What was also quite disappointing to see, was how a few of places within the Olympic Park had fallen into slight disrepair. It is no secret that the Chinese government has faltered slightly in securing continuous revenue for the site that had the eyes of the world on them in 2008. One hopes that the same does not happen to London.

Even though China is beginning to cement itself as the second superpower in the world, there are still several issues the Chinese government has to address. The most important of which, is how to lift many the other millions people still in poverty out of it.  Clearly evident in some areas I saw in Beijing.

Despite this, Beijing and China should be on everyone’s list of places to visit. It is a simply monumental place.