The Buildings
At the centre of the centre of China lies a corpse that nobody dare remove.
- Tiziano Terzani, Behind the Forbidden Door The square was not enlarged to its present size until ten years after the Communist takeover, when the Party ordained the building of ten new Soviet-style official buildings in ten months. These included the three that dominate Tian'anmen to either side - the Great Hall of the People, and the museums of Chinese History and Revolution. In 1976 a fourth was added in the centre - Mao's mausoleum, constructed (again in ten months) by an estimated million volunteers. It's an ugly building, looking like a school gym, which contravenes the principles of feng shui (geomancy), presumably deliberately, by interrupting the line from the palace to Qianmen and by facing north. Mao himself wanted to be cremated, and the erection of the mausoleum was apparently no more than a power ploy by his would-be successor, Hua Guofeng. In 1980 Deng Xiaoping said it should never have been built, although he wouldn't go so far as to pull it down again. The Chairman Mao Memorial Hall is open every morning from 8.30am to 11.30am, and from 2pm to 4pm on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, except in summer. After depositing your bag at the offices on the eastern side, you join the orderly queue of Chinese on the northern side. This advances surprisingly quickly, and takes just a couple of minutes to file through the chambers in silence - the atmosphere is reverent, and any joking around will cause deep offence. Mao's corpse is draped with a red flag within a crystal coffin. Mechanically raised from a freezer every morning, it looks unreal, like wax or plastic. It is said to have been embalmed with the aid of Vietnamese technicians who had recently worked on Ho Chi Minh (rumour has it that Mao's left ear fell off and had to be stitched back on). Once through the marble halls, you're herded past a splendidly wide array of tacky Chairman Mao souvenirs. North of here, Tian'anmen itself, the Gate of Heavenly Peace (daily 8am-5pm; Y30, students Y10), is the main entrance to the Forbidden City. An image familiar across the world, Tian'anmen occupies an exalted place in Chinese iconography, appearing on banknotes, coins, stamps and indeed virtually any piece of state paper you can imagine. As such it's a prime object of pilgrimage, with many visitors milling around waiting to be photographed in front of the large portrait of Mao (one of the very few still on public display), which hangs over the central passageway. Once reserved for the sole use of the emperor, but now standing wide open, the entrance is flanked by the twin slogans "Long Live the People's Republic of China" and "Long Live the Great Union between the Peoples of the World". From the reviewing platform above, Mao delivered the liberation speech on October 1, 1949, declaring that "the Chinese people have now stood up". For an exorbitant fee you can climb up to this platform yourself where security is tight - all visitors have to leave their bags, are frisked and have to go through a metal detector, before they can ascend. Inside, the fact that most people cluster around the souvenir stall selling official certificates of their trip reflects the fact that there's not much to look at. Taking up almost half the west side of the square is the Great Hall of the People . This is the venue of the National People's Congress and hundreds of black Audis with tinted windows are parked outside when it's in session. When it isn't, it's open to the public (daily 8.30-11.30am; Y35). What you are shown is a selection, usually six, of the 29 reception rooms - each named after a province and filled with appropriate regional artefacts. The climax of the tour is the massive five-thousand-seater banqueting hall - a neat way to intimidate world leaders. When Margaret Thatcher came here in 1982, she stumbled and fell to her knees on the steps outside. This was seen in Hong Kong as a dreadful omen for the negotiations she was having on their future. Mikhail Gorbachev in 1989 couldn't even come in through the front door; the crowds of demonstrators outside meant he had to make a secret entrance through the side. On the other side of the square, there are two museums housed in the same building: the Museum of Chinese History, covering everything up to 1919, and the Museum of the Revolution (Tues-Sun 8.30am-5pm; Y3). Both are full of propaganda, and the latter seems almost always to be closed for refits (for twelve years during the Cultural Revolution, for example) as its curators are faced with the Kafkaesque dilemma of constantly having to reinvent history according to the latest Party line. At the time of writing, however, a section of the vast building was open, with mostly dull exhibits from the twentieth century (these terminate at 1949, post-liberation history being just too contentious), while those from the last, including such oddments as a contract signed by a peasant selling his wife and "Weapons used by the British against the Tibetan People" are fascinating. There are copious English captions, but you might wish there weren't, as they are full of terms like "foreign aggression" and "colonial oppressors". The Museum of Chinese History (Tues-Sun 8.30am-5pm; Y3) is worth a visit, though it's intended for the education of the Chinese masses rather than foreign tourists, so there are no English captions. Without context or explanation visitors find themselves wandering the four sections - labelled "Primitive", "Slave", "Feudal" and "Semi-colonial" - looking at the most striking or bizarre stuff, of which there is plenty. For an overview of the square, head to the south gate, Zhenyangmen (daily 9am-4pm; Y2), similar to Tian'anmen and 40m high, which gives a good idea of how much more impressive the square would look if Mao's mausoleum hadn't been stuck in the middle of it.
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