2025 Donna & Dana's China Trip : 05/06/25

Tour 1; Day 3

Today's tour schedule:

Visit Temple of Heaven
High speed train to Xi'An

Today we started out with a visit to the Temple of Heaven (TH) in southeast Beijing. (There are no notes in my journal regarding the bus so loading all of our baggage (we're changed hotels) and getting to the TH must have been uneventful). The TH is spectacular, as are all of the "tourist" sites we've seen in China so far - I suppose that's one thing that makes them tourist sites... The TH is the largest public "park" in Beijing, 1.05 square miles (4x bigger than the Forbidden City). More than a "park", it is a complex of imperial Confucian buildings constructed from 1406 to 1420. The buildings are all wood and, more interestingly, built entirely without nails. The surrounding grounds are beautifully forested. According to our guide the entire complex was designed "for the people" to use in their "spare time". For me that begs the question 'just how much "spare time" did "the people" have in the 15th century?'. My sense is not a lot, being busy building walls and fighting off invasions and such - just a thought. In any case, the entire complex was, as I mentioned, spectacular. We spent ~2 hours walking ~1 mile south to north. Our first stop was the round slate at the center of the Circular Mound Altar (CMA), called the Heart of Heaven. There was a long line of people waiting for their moment standing directly on the slate as it is deemed to yield good fortune to those who do so and, according to legend, was where the Emperor prayed for good weather (for farming). The CMA is itself interesting in that it is 3 levels of marble stone. There are 9 steps up to each level and the deck of each level is laid out in a circular pattern such that each ring of marble stones has either 9 stones or a multiple thereof, 9 being a sacred number. Our next stop was the circular Imperial Vault of Heaven (IVH) which is flanked by two halls with artifact displays. Interesting (to engineers...) fact, the roof of the IVH has no cross member support beams. From the IVH it was a slight ascent across the 1,200 ft long marble Vermilion Steps Bridge to the main temple, The Hall of Prayer for Good Harvests (HPGH). The original HPGH burned down owing to a lightning strike in 1889 and was rebuilt several years later. The HPGH is a triple-gabled circular building (with no cross member roof support :-) ) built on a 3-level marble stone base and is the main feature of the park. Every structure in the park was magnificent in their own right, having them all in close proximity to each other bordered magnificent building saturation, I really had to step back and remind myself to appreciate what I was looking at by the time we got to the HPGH. We capped off the TPH visit with a short walk to lunch in the nicest restaurant we've been to so far.

After lunch we boarded the tour bus and made our way to the train station to catch the "High Speed Train" to Xi'An. The train station/terminal was huge, larger than many airport terminals we've been in. China has got this train business down to a science. The tour guide was quite explicit in his explanation of boarding the train. I'll paraphrase his instructions as "don't dilly dally around, they keep to a tight schedule and the doors close (for real, no holding them open) quickly". He wasn't kidding around - the train was off and running before we were anywhere near seated. And, when they said "high speed" they weren't kidding either, we were cruising at 350 km/hr (as indicated by the cabin display) or 217 mph - faster than my airplane! And smooth, unbelievable! Several people commented something to the effect "Why don't we have this technology?". I felt compelled to reply "We do. In fact much of this technology was likely invented in the US. What we don't have is the national wherewithal to apply it.". And that's enough about that... The train was on time to the minute and made the 700+ mile trip (with 4 stops) in 4.5 hrs. We saw a variety of housing and farms from the train. The housing is what one would expect near train tracks

Visibly poor shanty-like homes adjacent to large (corporate?) farms;
Huge 30+ floor multi-family buildings laid out in cookie cutter fashion;

Usually there would be 3 to 4 buildings exactly the same in a group but often as many as 10 (later in the trip we would see groups of 100 identical high-rise housing buildings in groups of 10 or so)

One had to assume the dense housing had to support nearby manufacturing but those plants were not always apparent.

A note on use of the term "shanty" -

In China I'd wager these homes were government designed (and provided?), in groups of 10 to 100 of near-identical units that appeared to provide basic shelter with rudimentary infrastructure including roads (not necessarily paved), plumbing and power. One glaring observation - there were cell phone towers (i.e. more than one) for every town I saw.
In South Africa, the first time we saw a "shanty" town (in 2019) adjacent to the Johannesburg airport, they were basically tin roofed squatter camps for hundreds of thousands of people with no infrastructure whatsoever - power was "hijacked" from passing power lines. One glaring observation there was the each hut (and that description is being generous) had a satellite dish.
China has a much better handle on this issue, but their solution still looks like a tough place to live.

- so, do the glaring observations suggest that cell phones have replaced TV as pablum for the displaced/homeless/destitute (oops, there are no homeless in China... actually, that claim is pretty much true as far as what we saw...)? Just thinkin'...

Anyway, the high speed train was very impressive (and one of the highlights of the trip for me). Coming into Xi'An we saw several groups of 10 or more high rise, multi-family buildings built in the last 10-15 years to support high tech auto and aircraft manufacturing. A new (as in different) tour bus (it wasn't "new" by any description, but it wasn't terrible...) picked us up at the train station in Xi'An, which is the largest train station in China. It was a 1-hour bus ride to the Grand Noble Hotel (GNH) in Xi'An (it's a big city like Beijing, but with only 13 million people...). We walked to dinner before we checked in as it was already a bit late. It could be that we were tired but I thought the dinner restaurant was the worst so far. There were several smokers inside and one other person in the group and I sat outside. I had decided I wasn't that hungry but ultimately ate, only because Donna was nice enough to bring us each a dish of food and join us outside... I note that in my journal that I was fairly upset writing "we're paying too much to put up with this BS". Like I said, it was a long day. We checked into the GNH, it was nice enough but the least impressive hotel so far.

Here are some pix...

Aerial view of the Temple of Heaven Park (globalsecurity.org). We started at the bottom and walked up the middle.

Map of Temple of Heaven Park (travelchinaguide.com)

Past the south gate, walking towards the Circular Mound Altar.

Taking our turn on the Heart of Heaven round slate.

View of the Imperial Vault of Heaven from the Circular Mound Altar.

The Imperial Vault of Heaven

Corner animals on the halls adjacent to the IVH. I suspect the metal wire/bar over the animals is a recent (as in the last 200 years or so) addition for lightning protection.