It’s the Great Pumpkin (head), Chairman Mao
The first batch of Beijing photos is in the Gallery.
I generally don’t go out of my way to see dead bodies. In fact, over the course of my life, I have tried to limit my encounters with corpses as much as possible. I don’t attend viewings. And if a funeral happens to be open casket, I try my best not to look. So, I haven’t seen many dead bodies in my life. In fact, I only distinctly remember two — and they were both spied, on separate occasions, through windows of Shanghai taxi cabs. Unlucky bicyclists. Heavy heaps on black streets, glowing red and blue from the lights of a nearby police car. Dead bodies. Or at least very, very sleepy ones.
Thus, I have a hard time explaining my eagerness to see a dead Chairman Mao. Perhaps the impulse is fueled by the same deep down demons that, each and every day, lure me to read the latest developments in the Michael Jackson case. (He licked the kid’s head!) Regardless, on my second day in Beijing last month, I made a B-line for Mao’s big mausoleum in the middle of Tiananmen Square. Brian, Jill and I checked our bags and cameras and froze in line with dozens of others, followers and freak-show enthusiasts alike. And let me tell you, it was worth the price of admission.
Or course, it was free. And it was over before you could say, “Is that the ear that fell off?” One of the perks of visiting Beijing during the dead of winter is that the line to see a dead Mao is not too long. Shortly after we took our places, the murmuring mass — several dozen people, four to a row, shoulder to shoulder — began to move. We stalled for a while next to the rather unfortuitously placed flower shop just inside the property gate. Several folks — more than I expected — were guilted into buying a plastic-wrapped bouquet. And about 30 steps later, in the mausoleum’s foyer, they were instructed to place the flowers onto metal carts placed like an aluminum fence in front of a large, white statue of a seated Mao Zedong. Some people prayed.
And I’m sure once the last guest of my group passed by the statue, the flowers were carried back outside, back to the store that would resell them to the next group of tourists enticed into showing, in the form of recycled flowers, their respects for the late great Chairman. Mao would have wanted it that way. We must not indulge in wastefulness and extravagance. He said it himself.
A sign outside the mausoleum entrance reads thusly: “Take off your hat and keep quiet.” I don’t know if Mao ever said that or not.
The rest happens rather quickly. Turn a corner and there he is, several feet away, wearing an army green uniform, lying on his back, covered by a large rectangular glass case. His face, rather orange and rather plastic, looks — how do I put this? — like a pumpkin. A glowing jack-o-lantern. I remember its striking color — radiant — but little else as far as details go. We were ushered through. Never stopped moving. No time to pause. No time to reflect. No time to inspect.
It was a very short visit to a rather large building. (What occupies the rest of the place?) But I did it. I saw Mao’s body.
Or did I?
“Do you think it is real?” my friend Ji Xiao Ming asked later that night at dinner.
“Do you?” I asked.
“Maybe it is not,” he said. “Maybe it is a wax figure.”
Xiao Ming laughed and a cook in a white suit began to carve up our duck. I ordered a bottle of bai jiu for the table. You know, when in Beijing …
I believe, if forced to choose between the two — Beijing duck or bai jiu — Jill would choose the duck. And she’s a strict vegetarian.
- Go here for 59 new Beijing photos, including the Forbidden City, the Summer Palace and much, much more. Sorry, no photos of dead Mao. (Great Wall pics coming soon … maybe tomorrow.)
- Go here for an informative/amusing/disgusting story about the process of preserving Mao’s body. Here’s a quote: “The library book recommended draining the body and injecting 16 litres of formaldehyde, but in their anxiety the doctors pumped in 22 litres. Mao’s face swelled like a ball and his ears stuck out at right angles. His skin turned slimy and formaldehyde oozed out of his pores like sweat. With no way to drain the chemical off, the doctors set to work on the Chairman’s face with towels and cotton balls, hoping to massage the fluid down into his body. When one of the nervous medicos pressed too hard, a hunk of Mao’s right cheek broke off and had to be patched up with dabs of make-up. In the end his body was so bloated the doctors needed to slit Mao’s jacket and pants to fit him into them.” (Link via Peking Duck)
- If traveling to Beijing on a budget, I highly recommend staying at the Downtown Beijing Backpackers Accomodation. It’s clean. It’s relatively cheap. It’s warm. And the people are nice. Best of all, though, it’s right in the middle of an old hutong neighborhood, on a small lane populated by backpacker bars and cafes — and plenty of regular residents who coexist peacefully with the relatively recent influx of foreigners to their neighborhood. (The DBBA also organizes hiking trips on the Great Wall. Very convenient. More on that later.)
- If you are into art — or just like traipsing around old factories — you might enjoy the Dashanzi Art District, which occupies the old 798 Factory in northeastern Beijing. A nice area to kill an afternoon.
- Anyone know how often they touch up Mao’s giant mug on Tiananmen? Looks like the Chairman spent some time at the beach since my last visit in August … or at least got his hands on some bronzer.
- I think Brian and Jill got a kick out of the Underground City, which I discovered last year. Many tourists don’t know about this place. Many locals — like my friend Xiao Ming — don’t either. Here’s what I wrote about it on the TripTik back in September:
Had some time to kill here in Beijing while waiting for a train, so I sought out one of the capital city’s more peculiar attractions, Dixia Cheng, or the Underground City. Masterminded by Mao at his most paranoid, this complex web of tunnels was built between 1969 and 1979 to help secure Beijing in the event of an attack … from the Soviet Union, according to my guide. If connected end-to-end, the tunnels would stretch longer than the Great Wall, I was told. There were schools and a hospital built underground, and even a theater in which Mao and his men would watch “military documentary movies.” If they weren’t blocked off, the tunnels could take you almost anywhere you wanted to go in the city, and even many places outside Beijing. As we passed one blocked corridor, I was told if we hiked through it for three days we would end up in Tianjin. The tunnels are decorated rather cheesily today, with camouflage hanging from walls adorned with photos of famous-and-not-so-famous communists, tanks, missiles, explosions and other stock military images. There are also mannequins — almost all female — decked out in army gear and gasmasks. Also underground is, of course, a store. There, you can purchase silk blankets, just like the ones the eldery and children would use down in the tunnels to stave off rheumatism — it’s pretty damp and cold down there. But for RMB 20, the tunnels still make for an interesting tour that adds to the mystery of Chairman Mao. There are entrances to the tunnels hidden all over the city. As we passed the hallway that would have led us to Tiananmen Square, I asked my guide where in the square it would take us. “Where would it come out?” she repeated with a giggle. “That is a military secret.” The Underground City is located at 62 Xi Damochang Lu in a hutong neighborhood near Qianmen Dajie. RMB 20 per person. 8:30 a.m. - 5 p.m. daily. Phone 67022657 or 67011389.
- If you are flying to Beijing from Shanghai, as we did, a Shanghai-based English-speaking ticket agent gets a big thumbs up from me. Her name is Lisa Xu and, for all of our routes, she consistently had the lowest prices of the many agents I queried. If she didn’t have the lowest price, she didn’t just meet the low price, she beat it. I will go to her first from now on. Contact Lisa at lisaxuni(@)yahoo.com or 13817892972. Tell her the Shanghai Diaries sent you!
03.11.2005, 10:10 PM · Diary, Observations, Photos, Travel
2 Comments
I was in Beijing this past summer and it’s weird seeing how blue the sky is and how few people there were in your pictures of the Forbidden City.
Reminds me of the time I visited Lenin’s mausoleum in Moscow in 1999. I was 15 and had indeed never seen a corpse before.
Russia, despite expectations, was hot. Damn hot. We waited in line in shade-less Red Square for about half an hour before approaching the low, squat marble building. Rather than a sign, Lenin has immaculate, severe-faced soldiers outside telling people to, yep, take their hats off and keep quiet.
As much as anything else we were just glad to get out of the sun. We walked downstairs, turned a corner, and there he was. Lying in a glass case, a red cloth draped over the stumps of legs that were amputated when they started to rot. Similar to Mao, he was bright orange and looked like wax. I walked round him in silence and back upstairs into that hot Moscow sun.
It’s such a non-event really, it looks like you feel similarly. Whether it was or was not him is immaterial, I simply couldn’t reconcile Lenin the historical figure with the figure lying in a glass case a few feet away. I felt nothing, I wouldn’t suggest anyone else bother except for the fact it’s such a great story:
“hey, I ever tell you guys about the time I saw LENIN?”