Beijing Day Two: Tiananmen Square and Mao's Tomb

This is from day two of Arie's trip to Beijing. You may want to start at day one.

I woke up early so that I could go see Mao Zedong's mausoleum before the crowds arrived. The mausoleum is in the center of Tiananmen Square, one subway stop from my apartment. The Beijing subway isn't great--it's probably the cheapest system in the world (a ride costs three yuan, about forty cents), but there are only four lines and they're widely spaced. The city is building seven more lines for the 2008 Olympics.

Tiananmen means "Gate of Heavenly Peace" (tian = heaven, an = peace, men = gate). Unlike, say, the Forbidden City, Tiananmen Square is a recent creation--in the 20th century, a number of buildings were razed to create a large open area. On orders of Mao Zedong, it was expanded in 1949 to become the largest public square in the world (it's larger than certain countries (well, the Vatican)). The square is famous in America for being the site of the June 4th, 1989 incident. Pro-democracy protests involving tens of thousands of students and workers had been going on in the square since April, but after negotiations failed, the government sent in troops. On June 3rd, tanks rolled into Tiananmen Square and opened fire on the protestors. It took seven hours to clear the square; the Chinese Red Cross reported about three thousand deaths. There's a famous photo of a man standing in front of a line of tanks; no one knows what happened to him, but the Chinese government says he "wasn't executed"--unlike many of the workers who led the protests. Today, the massacre is not discussed in China, and many children know nothing about it. For more detailed information, you may want to read the Wikipedia page on the incident; the Chinese government blocks access to that website from inside China.

Mao Zedong's mausoleum is in the middle of the square. The building itself is more or less what you'd expect a mausoleum to be, squat with lots of columns; I thought it wasn't nearly as dignified as Ho Chi Minh's mausoleum in Hanoi (which was built first). Outside the mausoleum were four statues, two on each side, of a bunch of young Chinese people looking very brave and Communist, all carrying shovels or plowshares or something and walking in a very determined manner.

I was early enough that there was only a very small line, though first I had to go across the street to check my camera bag. The line moved very quickly, pausing only in front of a small stand inside the fence. The stand was selling flowers, and a lot of people were buying them. The line then went inside, and in the atrium was a large statue of Mao, and everyone with a flower leaned it against the statue along with hundreds of others (I later learned that the government has someone collect them all and return them to the stall so they can be "sold" repeatedly).

Past the statue was Mao's preserved body, encased in crystal. The team that developed the crystal coffin apparently had a very difficult task because by that point in history (1976), the Soviet Union, which had created the coffins for the other preserved communist leaders (Lenin and Ho Chi Minh), was not on friendly terms with China and so China had to develop the technology with help only from Viet Nam. The team first had a wax replica of Mao made in case they destroyed his body in the work, and some believe that the real body has long since decayed.

They certainly don't give you much time to look. The line moves quickly past the coffin, and there are armed soldiers who scold you if you stop even momentarily. It was hard to get more than a brief glimpse. Mao's body (I think) is in a crystal case at about eye level, lit by halogen lights that give his skin a bit of a yellow cast. He looks older than I expected, but that's obvious in retrospect--the portraits of him that are everywhere are of him when he was younger.

The last room in the mausoleum was surprising. I expected a few posters about Mao's life, or perhaps a plain hall, but instead there was: a gift shop. Filled with tacky crap. If you want a Mao Zedong wristwatch or bookmark, that's the place to go. I bought a few cigarette lighters with Mao's face on them; when you open them, they play some sort of patriotic song.

The mausoleum was built with material from all over China, and 700,000 people did "symbolic labor" to contribute to its construction. It later turned out that the symbolic labor was actually useless--the government bused in thousands of people to each carry a brick to a "work site", and the next busload would carry the bricks back to the original spot.

I was a little surprised that people here have such a high opinion of Mao given his history. Mao's lack of understanding of economics and agriculture combined with his contempt for human life led directly to the deaths of at least thirty million people, probably tens of millions more. But it turns out that Mao is fairly beloved in China, and there are even temples dedicated to him. The official party position is that Mao was "seventy percent right and thirty percent wrong", though they don’t talk about him much anymore.

I reclaimed my camera, found a Bank of China ATM that would give me money, bought a hat, and walked down Wangfujing Dajie (Wangfujing Avenue), a major upscale commercial area. I was struck by the prevalence of Olympics-related signs and activities (the 2008 Olympics will be hosted in Beijing). Like everything else done by governments, the Beijing Olympics are highly politicized. They have five mascots, animals drawn from all over China; one is the Tibetan Antelope (just to rub in that Tibet is part of China). In preparation for the Olympics, the government has passed laws that enable ejection of non-residents during the Games, requiring locals to stay indoors during the games, and various other suspicious things. Reporters Without Borders has called a boycott because of China's censorship-related activities relating to the Olympics.

At the southern end of Tiananmen Square is the Qianmen ("Front Gate", same "men" as in Tiananmen, known formally as Zhengyangmen). It was once the gate to the Imperial City, which no longer exists. The first gate on the site was built in 1419, though this one is from, strangely, 1914. It's the tallest gate in the city. You can see from its construction that "gate" doesn't just mean a metal door that swings open; these guys are not playing around when it comes to gate building.

Even in the freezing cold weather, Tiananmen Square is crowded (though I imagine it's packed in the summer). There are a lot of tourists, both domestic and foreign, and a lot of police. The Chinese government has learned their lesson; the Square is now heavily monitored by uniformed police and video cameras, and there are a significant number of plainclothes police hanging around. It's creepy. There are also a lot of people trying to sell stuff, mostly cheap Mao trinkets, kites, postcards, etc.

Near the center of the Square is the Monument to the People's Heroes, a stone pillar more than one hundred and twenty feet high. It commemorates those who lost their lives in the 19th and 20th centuries in China's revolutions (from the First Opium War to the Communist Revolution).

Continue to Arie Goes to the Forbidden City.