A 3 Day visit to Beijing: Day 3 - The Temple of Heaven & the 1,500 mile train journey

For the final day in Beijing we woke up bright and early to get to the Temple of Heaven. I read that if you arrive before 8am that it won’t be packed with tourists, and that many folk surround the temple to practice martial arts and meditate – something I wanted to capture.

However, with it being a public holiday and all, thousands of other people seemed to have the same idea. I didn’t see any kick ass Tai Chi or Kung Fu masters, but I did see a large group of middle-aged women dancing to blasting house music – a rather common site in every public space in Chinese cities, and harshly speaking not a very impressive site.

Nonetheless, the temple itself was astonishing. It is a Taoist temple built around the same time as the Forbidden City for emperors of the Qing and Ming dynasties, acting as a place for religious ceremonies carried out annually to encourage good harvests for the year ahead.

These ceremonies usually consisted of prayers held in the Hall of Prayer for Good Harvests (the circular building), and in the surrounding buildings the inevitable ancient animal sacrifices.

The buildings themselves are packed with intricate detailing and colour, which when zoomed in close up (with my awesome camera) look amazing - How dedicated must these people who built these structures have been! I feel inspired to decorate my future house ceilings in this style. Common symbols seen throughout is that of a circle representing heaven (hence the circular altar for communicating with the heavens) and a square representing earth.

It was all highly interesting, and greatly relaxing to walk around the park before a 9 hour train journey back to Guangzhou.

A 9 hour trip back on the Bullet Train

I was expecting the journey back to be hell. The public transport I’d encountered in Sichuan had left me with low expectations. However, the trip back was great! We took the bullet train, which cut a once 22 hour train journey to just 9 hours!

So it was a great opportunity to, in a speedy sort of way, see pretty much all of China from near north to south. Some interesting sites were seen along the way, such as:

• A rocket, in the middle of a huge field
•  A large wheat field with a working telephone booth dead in the centre…someone was using it at the time
• Probably some of the worst living conditions I have seen. When I say it was a rubbish tip with shanty houses built on top, I’m not over-exaggerating.
• A lot of flat land. So much flat land. What happened to all the mountains?

I attempted taking some photos, but the speed of the train made it pretty tricky…

Once we approached the city of Wuhan the pollution levels went through the roof...

We eventually arrived back in Guangzhou at 10:30pm and had a mighty good sleep…after a 1.5 hour trip on a packed metro.

To conclude my trip to Beijing – I loved it. So many people tried to put me off visiting Beijing, saying I’d just be going to see the ‘big grey scar of China’. However I found it to be a place packed with charm. Again, maybe I visited just at the right time and the grey smog reclaimed the city just as I left, but the pollution can’t cover up how rich the city’s history is. I hope the pollution issue is remedied in the not too distant future, because it is beginning to have a noticeable effect on some of the architectural relics of the Forbidden City. I hope China can be proud of its capital again.

Zai’jian!