Last Chance to See

bed.
    We put on our sunglasses and cameras and went and spent the day looking at the Great Wall at Badaling, an hour or so outside Beijing. It looked to be remarkably freshly built for such an ancient monument, and probably the parts we saw had been.
    I remembered once, in Japan, having been to see the Gold Pavilion Temple in Kyoto and being mildly surprised at quite how well it had weathered the passage of time since it was first built in the fourteenth century. I was told it hadn’t weathered well at all, and had in fact been burned to the ground twice in this century.
    “So it isn’t the original building?” I had asked my Japanese guide.
    “But yes, of course it is,” he insisted, rather surprised at my question.
    “But it’s been burned down?”
    “Yes.”
    “Twice.”
    “Many times.”
    “And rebuilt.”
    “Of course. It is an important and historic building.”
    “With completely new materials.”
    “But of course. It was burned down.”
    “So how can it be the same building?”
    “It is always the same building.”
    I had to admit to myself that this was in fact a perfectly rational point of view, it merely started from an unexpected premise. The idea of the building, the intention of it, its design, are all immutable and are the essence of the building. The intention of the original builders is what survives. The wood of which the design is constructed decays and is replaced when necessary. To be overly concerned with the original materials, which are merely sentimental souvenirs of the past, is to fail to see the living building itself.
    I couldn’t feel entirely comfortable with this view, because it fought against my basic Western assumptions, but I did see the point.
    I don’t know whether this principle lies beneath the rebuilding of the Great Wall, because I couldn’t find anybody who understood the question. The rebuilt section was swarming with tourists and Coca-Cola booths and shops where you can buy Great Wall T-shirts and electric pandas, and this may also have had something to do with it.
    We returned to our hotel.
    The maid had found my hidden glass of water and washed it. She must have searched hard for it because she had also found the bottle of aftershave under the bed and had placed it neatly back on the table by the others.
    “Why don’t you just use the stuff?” asked Mark.
    “Because I’ve smelled them all and they’re horrid.”
    “You could give them to people for Christmas.”
    “I don’t want to carry them around the world till then.”
    “Remind me again why you bought them.”
    “I can’t remember. Let’s go to dinner.”
    We went to a restaurant called Crispy Fried Duck for dinner,and walking back through the city centre afterward we came to a square called Tiananmen.
    I should explain that this was October 1988. I had never heard the name Tiananmen Square, and neither had most of the world.
    The square is huge. Standing in it at night, you have very little idea of where its boundaries are, they fade into the distance. At one end is the gateway to the Forbidden City, the Tiananmen Gate, from which the great iconic portrait of Chairman Mao gazes out across the vastness of the square, out toward its farthest point, where there stands the mausoleum in which his body lies in state.
    In between these two, beneath his gaze, the mood was festive. Huge topiary bushes carved into the figures of cartoon animals had been imported into the square to celebrate the Olympics.
    The square was not full or crowded—it would take many tens or even hundreds of thousands of people to achieve that—but it was busy. Families were out with their children (or more usually, with their single child). They walked around, chatting with friends, milling about easily and freely as if the square were their own garden, letting their children wander off and play with others without an apparent second thought. It would be hard to imagine anything of the kind in any of the great squares of Europe, and inconceivable in America.
    In fact, I cannot remember any time that I have felt so easy and relaxed in a busy public place, particularly at night. The background static of wary paranoia that you take with you as a matter of unconscious habit when you step out into the streets of Western cities made itself suddenly apparent by falling silent. It was a quite magical silence.
    I have to say, though, that this was probably the only time we felt so easy in China, or indeed easy at all. For