Dallas Smith’s 2024 China Blog #1

Welcome to new and previous readers of my travel blogs.   I’ve been writing my travel blogs for at least fifteen years to offer vicarious pleasures to my readers by sharing my personal travel experiences from my perspective as an amateur cultural anthropologist.  My perspective is strongly formed by my having spent a year (1969-70) studying in Germany at age twenty-one.  Because of the Vietnam War and the possibility of being drafted into military service, I stayed out of the US for over three years until the war ended and the draft was canceled.  During those years I lived for seven months in Sweden (a favorite destination for draft evaders), and in 1971 I traveled overland through Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan, and Pakistan, to visit India for the first time, leading to many subsequent visits.  I first discovered the Indian flute during that visit, a discovery that changed the course of my life.  When I returned to the US, I wasn’t eager to live in Georgia, my birth state, again.  When I visited California for the first time in 1974 I discovered Ali Akbar College of Music in San Rafael, California.  I relocated to Marin County in 1975 to enroll at AACM and have lived in the west ever since. 

Those travel experiences in my twenties inspired my love of travel later in life.  In 1984 I met Susan Mazer whom I married in 1987.  We worked diligently as professional musicians while creating our company Healing Healthcare Systems.  Except for working as entertainers on cruise ships, we didn’t take any international trips for seventeen years.  Once we started traveling again internationally, we tried to take at least one international trip a year.  We sold our company, Healing Healthcare Systems, three years ago.  This year, 2024, we are traveling more than ever, spending almost half this year traveling to India, Sweden, Greece, and now, China. 

Welcome to China

We arrived in Beijing, China, yesterday.  India recently surpassed China as the world’s most populous country.  Both are home to approximately 1.4 billion people.  I’ve visited India many times.  India sees itself as China’s rival.  I had expected to find a similar experience of a country overburdened by its huge population as I had in India.  I was wrong.  Beijing is a clean modern city that doesn’t feel overwhelmingly crowded, despite its population of 21 million inhabitants.  My first impression of Beijing is of a clean modern city with many trees and green areas.  I haven’t seen poor laborers and the beggars that one sees on the streets of India.  I understand that the rural areas of China are populated by poor peasant farmers who have not benefited from urban progress.  In any case, my first impression of Beijing is very positive.

I had not prepared for the “great firewall of China”, a national policy of total information control that forbids access to Google, YouTube, Whatsapp, Telegram, etc.   So I am writing the initial pages of this blog in the hopes that I will be able to transmit them to my blog readers when we transfer from Shanghai to a Viking cruise ship, which uses a satellite connection to provide its basic web access.  I’m able to spend more time writing my blog in the evening instead of spending time web surfing.  Logging into the hotel’s network yielded this warning:

Surfing or browsing foreign websites in China might not be accessible or slow due to Government regulations, e.g. Google, WhatsApp, YouTube, Gmail, Facebook, or Twitter.

Day One:  Tiananmen Square and the Forbidden City

Today, our first full day in Beijing consisted of a visit to Tiananmen Square and the Forbidden City, the extensive home of Chinese emperors for centuries.  Tiananmen Square at ninety-one acres is the largest public square in the world.  It can easily hold half a million people, and even attracted a million people to Chairman Mao Zedong’s celebrations.  Since the student democracy uprising of 1989 that was brutally suppressed by the government, access to Tiananmen Square is strongly controlled.  We were required to show our passports as we passed through inspection points leading to the square.  Policemen are numerous, and there are cameras on every light post covering the entire square.

From Tiananmen Square, we entered the “Forbidden City.”  It is an imperial palace complex of the Ming and Qing dynasties from 1368–1912.  It covers 180 acres and contains over eight hundred buildings and over nine thousand rooms.  The Forbidden City took 14 years to build (from 1406 to 1420) and was built by over 1,000,000 workers, including more than 100,000 craftsmen.  During the Ming and Qing dynasties, the Forbidden City was forbidden for commoners and only opened for imperial families and government officials who were invited. Now, it’s open for all as a tourist attraction.

Day Two:  The Great Wall of China

The Great Wall of China is perhaps China’s most unique and famous creation.  It was constructed over several centuries by millions of workers, spanning over five thousand miles.  It was built to protect China from its neighboring rivals, primarily the Mongolians, who had previously invaded and occupied all of China as part of Genghis Khan’s largest conquest in world history, stretching from China to Europe. 

Many sections of the wall have deteriorated over the centuries.  The best-preserved sections were built by the Ming dynasty from the 13^th- 17^th centuries.  Our tour today took us to a repaired section of the wall about an hour’s drive north of Beijing.  Beijing is on a flat plain.  The section of the wall closest to Beijing is located along the mountain tops of the range of mountains nearest to Beijing’s plains.  It was assumed that any invaders would necessarily be forced to approach from the main valley north of Beijing.  There is an official gate that guarded that route.  Any lookouts who might have noticed an army approaching that route into the Beijing plain would build fires as a signal to alert the forces protecting that approach to Beijing.  The wall protected Beijing until a rebel force threatened the Ming dynasty from inside China.  The Ming dynasty invited the Manchurians (“Manchus”) to enter through the wall from the north.  The Manchus stopped the rebel army, but they stayed in Beijing and overthrew the Ming dynasty in 1644, establishing the Qing (pronounced “ching”) dynasty which lasted until 1911.  However, the Qings did not expand the Great Wall.

Our visit today was dominated by rain and fog.  We were unable to see the Great Wall’s distant extensions.  But the fog gave a mysterious mood that spurred my imagination to picture what it would have been like for the Chinese soldiers in the Middle Ages who manned the outposts on Beijing’s northern border.  The wall was constructed following the steep mountain landscapes, resulting in a challenging walk today, especially because the stone paths were wet and somewhat slippery. 

The Great Wall was an amazingly ambitious project spanning generations of laborers. It is considered the largest construction project in the history of the world.  It can even be seen from outer space.  Learning about the history of the Great Wall opens up a better understanding of Chinese history and culture.

76 Years Old

On September 8th I celebrated my 76^th birthday.  When I turned 70 my line was: If I can live to 140 then I’m only middle-aged.  At 76 I still luckily feel middle-aged.  I’m very lucky to be in good health, financially secure, and in a great marriage.  I’ll never retire from my music.