Northeast Of Tian''anmen
The most exciting sight in the north of the city is the Yonghe Gong , Tibetan Lama Temple (daily 9am-5pm; Y10), northeast of the Forbidden City and just south of the Yonghe Gong subway stop. If you see no other temple in the city, this is worth the effort - you won't see many more colourful temples, though it is a little touristy. It was built towards the end of the seventeenth century as the residence of Prince Yin Zhen. In 1723, when the prince became the Emperor Yong Zheng and moved into the Forbidden City, the temple was retiled in imperial yellow and restricted thereafter to religious use. It became a lamasery in 1744, housing monks from Tibet and also from Inner Mongolia, over which it had a presiding role, supervising the election of the Mongolian Living Buddha, who was chosen by lot from a gold urn. After the civil war in 1949, the Yonghe Gong was declared a national monument and for thirty years was closed; remarkably it escaped the Cultural Revolution. Visitors are free to wander through the prayer halls and gardens, though the experience is largely an aesthetic rather than a spiritual one. As well as the amazing mandalas hanging in side halls, there is some notable statuary. In the Third Hall the draped statues are nandikesvras , Buddhas having sex, which earned the lamasery its reputation as China's most illustrious sex manual - the statues were once used to educate emperor's sons. The Hall of the Wheel of Law, behind it, has a gilded bronze statue of the founder of the Yellow Hat Sect and paintings which depict his life, while the thrones next to it are for the Dalai Lamas when they used to come here to teach. In the last, grandest hall, the Wanfu Pavilion , an eighteen-metre-high statue of the Maitreya Buddha is made from a single trunk of sandalwood, a gift for Emperor Qianlong from the seventh Dalai Lama. The wood is Tibetan and it took three years to ship it to Beijing. The lamasery is not just a beautiful building - and with its gardens, a refuge - but it also functions as an active Tibetan Buddhist centre , basically for propaganda purposes, to show China guaranteeing and respecting the religious freedom of the minorities, but it's questionable how genuine are the monks you see wandering around. This is where the puppet Panchen Lama chosen by the Chinese state was officially sworn in in 1995, the Dalai Lama's choice of soul boy, a six-year-old child, having disappeared. Next to the Yonghe Gong, on the west side, is a quiet hutong lined with little shops selling religious tapes, incense and images. This street, one of the city's oldest, has been home to scholars since the Yuan dynasty and is lined with pailous, decorative arches, which once graced many of Beijing's streets - they were torn down in the 1950s as a hindrance to traffic. On the right, about 100m down, the Confucius Temple (daily 8.30am-5pm; Y10) is a rather dry place, used for decades as a museum. In the courtyard, steles record the names of those who studied here and passed the civil service exams. The last few steles are Qing, paid for by the scholars themselves as the emperor refused to fund them. The Main Hall is a dark, haphazard museum holding incense burners and musical instruments. Another, new museum in a side hall holds a diverse range of artefacts - the Tang pottery, which includes images of pointy-faced foreigners, is the most diverting. At the back, a warehouse-like building holds stele texts of the thirteen Confucian classics, calligraphy which once formed the standard to be emulated by all scholars. But perhaps the best thing to do here is sit on a bench in the peaceful courtyard, among ancient, twisted trees, and enjoy the silence. Returning to the Yonghe Gong and heading north, Ditan Park (daily 6am-9pm; Y1) is just 100m away, more interesting as a place to wander among the trees and spot the odd tai ji performance than for its small museum (Y5) holding the emperor's sedan chair and the enormous altar at which he performed sacrifices to the earth. Heading back to the centre from the Yonghe Gong by bus or bike you could look in at the China Art Gallery (Tues-Sun 9am-4pm; entrance fee varies, Y2-20), at the top end of Wangfujing, on the route of bus #2 which runs north-south between Qianmen and Andingmen Dajie, or trolleybus #104, which runs between Andingmennei Dajie and Beijing Zhan. A huge and draughty building, it usually holds a couple of shows at once, though there's no permanent collection. Shows in the past have included specialist women's and minority exhibitions, even a show of socialist realist propaganda put up not to inspire renewed vigour but as a way to consider past follies. Revolutionary imagery has long had its day and Chinese painting is enjoying something of a renaissance at the moment, with some very interesting work emerging from the Beijing art colleges. You can check their work out in July, when they hold their degree shows here, and it's also a good place to meet some of the most bohemian Chinese, the art students. Check the listings magazines for what's on.
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