Beijing

China is very into dragons. On the 5th day of the 5th month of the Chinese lunar calendar they celebrate Dragon Boat Festival. This year it fell on Friday, June 7th and allowed me to take a little trip over the three-day weekend. I headed up to Beijing with my friend Angelica who lives in Shanghai. She moved to China around the same time I did from Singapore.

We rendezvoused at the Shanghai train station and got on the bullet train Thursday night. A trip that would take 14 hours by car took us 4 hours and 18 minutes! The ticket each way was about $80. The high speed rail system in China is amazing.

We spent the weekend in an old apartment in a hutong. The word hutong means “alley” in Chinese, but is also used to refer to the old neighborhoods formed by a series of siheyuans. A siheyuan is a courtyard surrounded by buildings on all sides.

Our hutong was full of giant old trees growing out of the neighboring courtyards. I hadn’t expected to see so much nature in the middle of Beijing! In old neighborhoods like the one we stayed in many buildings don’t have bathrooms so there are always people out and about headed to the communal public toilet.

Our first destination on Friday morning was the Great Wall! We went to a quiet section of the wall called Huanghuacheng that’s still kind of wild.

The wall’s been restored a bit, but parts of it were still crumbling and being taken over by vegetation. The wall zig zags all over the mountains and is quite steep.

We were all by ourselves for most the morning and it was the most peaceful experience I’ve had in China. Shout out to Angelica for being my photographer.

For lunch we had fried trout, spring onion pancakes, deep-fried greens, and a vinegary mushroom salad at a little spot off the road. It was one of the best meals I’ve had in China!

In the evening we found a show to go to at a punk rock bar called School. The show was put on by a local record label called Maybe Mars. Holy Shit and White+ played. If I were to make some broad generalizations I would say that Shanghai seems to be more into electronic music while Beijing is more into rock and roll.

On Saturday we headed to another ancient wonder – The Forbidden City! It is so named because nobody could enter or leave the palace without the emperor’s permission. The giant palatial complex housed China’s emperors from 1420 to 1912. It is massive. I was struck by the amount of land it occupies as well as the giant scale of the buildings we passed through as we entered. We walked along the top of the wall surrounding the city and had a view of endless golden roofs. The buildings were all so iconic and majestic.

We went by Tiananmen Square afterwards which had a heavy amount of security. All visitors must show their passports to enter and then there are cameras watching from all angles. I wondered if this was extra security due to the recent anniversary of a sensitive event, but it turns out it’s always like this. It gave me goosebumps to stand on this land and think of the events that transpired 30 years ago.

Now, the main reason I wanted to visit Beijing was to go on a hunt for pigeon whistles. This practice used to be quite common in Beijing, but is becoming much less common since the city has technically outlawed the keeping of pigeons. I had connected with a writer on Instagram who is working on a book about pigeon whistles and he directed me to a hutong in Beijing where the pigeon people live. He had shared the name of a friend who owns a tea house, so that was our first stop. We met a lovely woman named Yanyan who’s originally from the Fujian province and owns Alice’s Tea House. She has been studying tea for several years, having been attracted to it because of her fascination with water. We tried some really interesting teas that I had never heard of before! One was an oolong milk tea (jin xuan or 金萱) whose leaves naturally smell like milk! When the tea is brewed with water it had a creamy flavor as if milk had been added to it. It was delicious. I was also very delighted by some lychee black tea that we tried. Supposedly during the Tang Dynasty (618 – 907) the emperor had a concubine named Yang who loved lychees. Each year the emperor would send an expedition to collect the fruit in Southern China and transport it back to Xi’an (the former capital of China). The fruit was rushed back to the royal palace by horse as quickly as possible to keep it from spoiling. During this time they also discovered how to use lychee juice to flavor black tea – the creation of the world’s first fruit tea!

Yanyan was a little confused about why I was so interested in pigeons, but took me to her neighbor’s house which has a pigeon coop on top. I had hoped to meet him, but he was taking his afternoon nap so Angelica and I continued on through the hutong. We went to a fancy restaurant to try a little peking duck and then Angelica found a rooftop bar to hang out at while I went back to the pigeon hutong around sunset. There were many flocks of pigeons flying in circles over the roofs. I wandered through some narrow alleys until I found a few men hanging out with a pigeon coop overhead. I said hello and they were all happy to talk to me. Folks in Northern China seem to be a bit more friendly and open to conversation with strangers than where I live. I asked if they had any pigeon whistles and one man went inside his house to get some that he had made himself.

He blew through them to demonstrate the sound they make. I’m curious how often they actually get tied them to the pigeons to make music, but my Chinese wasn’t quite good enough to get my question across.

It was nice watching all the pigeons and seeing everyone out in the street chatting with their neighbors. I like how in older Chinese neighborhoods everyone spends their time outside with their neighbors. It’s the same in old town Suzhou.

On Saturday morning we got some brunch at a yummy vegetarian restaurant, found a pretty rooftop terrace for coffee, and then took the train back to Shanghai. I really liked Beijing – it felt a little more laid back and a little cozier than Shanghai does. I hope to make it back!