BEIJING

I visited the capital of China back in 1983 on a five-week group trip through much of the country and we stayed about two weeks in BEIJING when the group returned to Italy while my girlfriend and I decided to stay longer because we liked the city a lot but on the given day we had seen very little. You have to think that in 1983 China was a poor and underdeveloped country and the Chinese all dressed the same way with blue or green tunics, both men and women, only the children were dressed in Western style, the small boys with dicks and bare bottoms so they didn't make a mess. There were very few cars and millions of all black bicycles. There were few skyscrapers, mostly the houses were low and blackened by the coal used for cooking, The Chinese were wary of us, it seems they feared being stung for accusing us of bothering us and in any case none of them spoke English, not even in the hotels and restaurants so it was difficult to communicate. There is a pedestrian street dedicated to shopping, Vanfungjing street where we were invited to inaugurate a shopping centre, filmed by cameras and we bought three fur coats spending around 600 dollars which in Italy were worth around 5,000 euros. We ate every day at the Peking Hotel in the best restaurant in the city, spending around 3 euros each, especially the excellent ravioli filled with meat and vegetables, drinking a lot of tea. We went almost every day to the Forbidden City because it was a real city within the city (1,000 x 700 meters) and we always discovered new things in the large courtyards and in the many buildings and then there were very few foreign tourists and even Chinese ones all busy working to earn money. the bread. The largest palace is that of Supreme Harmony, all made of wood and where the emperors were proclaimed and where the largest throne is located. The city had been inhabited by 24 emperors over a period of 500 years and the last emperor was the one in Bertolucci's famous film who won a dozen Oscars, a child emperor who was then corrupted and exploited by the occupying Japanese and finally forced to retire to do the gardener during the communist period of Mao Tse Tung. The city had been inhabited by 24 emperors over a period of 500 years and the last emperor was the one in Bertolucci's famous film who won a dozen Oscars, a child emperor who was then corrupted and exploited by the occupying Japanese and finally forced to retire to do the gardener during the communist period of Mao Tse Tung. However, the large state shops were stocked with everything, almost exclusively Chinese products, not like in Moscow where they were desolately empty. We went to see the beautiful Temple of Heaven, truly extraordinary, predominantly blue with three floors, with a circular dome and wooden walkways decorated with colorful designs painted on the ceilings and columns, there is a beautiful park, in short, a delightful place. Equally relaxing is the Summer Palace which has a large lake, lots of lawns and a large palace on a hill that looks quite similar to the Temple of Heaven. Unfortunately the Europeans destroyed most of the other buildings to punish the Chinese for not obeying their orders, it seems that it was more impressive and richer than all the European royal palaces put together. Then the Dalai Lama temple, a very popular place of worship that smells of sticks burned by the faithful, has an 18 meter high Buddha and prayer wheels and bronze statues. While outside Beijing we visit the Ming tombs with long avenues that have stone statues of animals on the sides and then large buildings where the tombs are contained. Finally the Great Wall of China in Badaling which is truly impressive given that the walls are very high from 5 to 8 meters and the towers are very large and between one and the other there is almost a road, in short a wide path, not like where we are we generally have narrow walls. They were almost 21,000 km long of which 345 km of trenches, built to defend the empire over the course of 1500 years from the attack of the Mongols who lived beyond the northern border, built 2300 years ago, is one of the seven wonders of UNESCO. In the center in front of the Forbidden City there was the enormous Tian'an Men Square with the House of the People or the Parliament building, where on October 1st 1949 the birth of the People's Republic of China was declared and where in 1989 there was the revolt of students repressed in blood.