Beijing Part III: Generation Gap

My decision to go teach in China was somewhat chaotically planned, even if the decision was not impulsive. After I decided to go and had heard back from the school, my grandmother brought out this scrapbook and told me that my great-great grandfather also taught in China.  Now, I had heard this before, vaguely, over the years.  Now that I was about to travel to one of the countries my great great grandfather traveled to, I was exponentially more interested in this ancestors experience.

I flipped through the scrap book, which my grandmother was nice enough to give to me, and decided, somewhat impulsively to take a few of them out and bring them with me.   I did not, at the time, know how much traveling I would be able to achieve, but I had some vague notion that I would try and recapture these shots while I was in China.

My great great grandfather had his doctorate in entomology and he worked at Cornell University.  He spent a few years teaching abroad, and some of those years were spent at Beijing Normal University.  He took with him his daughter, who I believe was the photographer of most of these pictures.  She took many pictures of Beijing, many places which are still open to the public, albeit changed somewhat.  When I visited Beijing (and on one of my trips, I was able to visit Beijing Normal, as a friend of mine now lives and works there--life can be so weird, am I right?) I made it my goal to recreate these photographs to the best of my ability.  I feel like I was largely successful.

I wish I was able to find more of the pictures that they took, but it was a challenge with some of them.  The Ming Tombs are extensive, and not limited to Beijing; without a bit more information, some of the pictures were hard for me to replicate.  Of course, many of these sites also look very different; many have been renovated or remodeled.  In the case of the temple of heaven, there were some gates that were reconstructed, making it difficult for me to get the angles right.  However, I am pretty happy with the shots I was able to get.  It was also really cool to stand in some of these places and look at the photos and see the differences.  And it was cool to stand in some of these places and know that almost 100 years earlier, family of mine had stood there too.

Ming Tombs...I thought climbing on these was a bad idea...but then I saw half the Chinese doing the same thing, so I decided to go ahead and try it on just one statue, for photo recreating accuracy...

Ming Tombs Gate...Yeah, I think this was probably rebuilt...

Ming Tombs Camel Statue

Temple of Heaven....their was a gate right behind me, and I could not really back up an further or zoom out, so the angle is not quite the same. 

I wanted to talk ab little bit about the Temple of Heaven, as it is also one of the more recognized monuments of Beijing. What I have been able to garner from signs, brochures, and automated tours, the Temple of Heaven was the place of ceremonies in ancient China.  Offerings to the crown and to deities were brought to the Altar of Heaven (located down the lane from the Temple itself) and ceremonies were held at the temple.  It seems largely to be a place of worship restricted only for the aristocracy.  Today, it is mostly open to the public; people can walk through and visit both the temple and the altar.  In other buildings alongside the temple and the rather long corridor that leads from temple to altar are buildings that have items on display from past centuries, like mini museums.  Of course, many of them are also souvenir shops.  If you want to know more about the history of this site, check out the UNESCO world heritage page here http://whc.unesco.org/en/list/881.

I love the stone railings that are all over this place, and have about a billion pictures of said stonework.  I think one of my favorite moments each time I visited was visiting the Altar.  First, because it is nothing but that fantastic stonework, and second because you can sit on the altar's stone.  People are pretty good about taking turns doing this too, which is nice, since there are no park authorities regulating this section; its just a free for all.  It is really cute to see the kinds of poses that people come up with for picture time with the stone.

The forested park surrounding the temple is enormous and it is typically filled with elderly Beijing citizens (you can buy a pass that just lets you into the surrounding park, and not the historic sites, and it is less money).  These seniors gather on nice-weather days to socialize and also to exercise.  There will frequently be elderly Beijingers dancing, doing tai chi ( or taiji, 太極拳), or doing aerobics.  And it's just so cute.  I like the Temple of Heaven because it is in the middle of this mini-forest in the middle of one of the most populated cities in the world.  So it feels less crowded, and for some reason, it is just easier to breathe here than it is elsewhere in the city.

Alter of Heaven...there was a wall around it, so I could not get quite the same shot. 

I couldn't quite get the same shots, but I still think these are pretty cool.