I had been looking to this past
weekend since I arrived in Beijing because my program had a trip to the
Forbidden City planned. The Forbidden City is the Imperial Palace of the
Emperors of the Ming and Qing Dynasties. It was started in 1406 and finished in
1420. The Forbidden City is the largest and most complete group of ancient
building that China has preserved (all but one building has been repaired due
to fires). In total, 24 Emperors lived in the Forbidden City. In 1911, the last
emperor, Puyi (only age three when he succeeded the throne), of Qing Dynasty
was overthrown and the Republic of China was established lead by the Kuomintang
(headed by Sun Yat-sen). In 1925, the Forbidden City was repurposed as the
museum it is today.
6 fast facts about the Forbidden
City:
1) It occupies 720,000 square
meters or 180 acres. To give a physical comparison, the Vatican is only 440,000
square meters. It took over 200,000 laborers to complete the Forbidden City.
2) There are 9,999 rooms inside
the City. Nine is a lucky number for the Chinese.
3) The walls of the city are 32
feet high and the drainage moat around the city is 165 feet wide.
4) All of the buildings are made
from painted wood. To deal with fires, there are giant bronze cauldrons filled
with water (see pictures) placed throughout the palace.
5) At the end of the 18th
century, it is said that about 9,000 people lived in the City (guards,
servants, eunuchs, concubines, civil servants, and of course, the Royal Family.
6) Speaking of concubines,
Emperors were entitled to several wives and lots of concubines. Concubines were
well-educated women selected from the best Manchu families. The Emperor would
choose which concubine would visit him each night and the number of times each
concubine was chosen determined her social standing in the palace.
The whole experience of visiting
the Forbidden City was thought provoking. As I walked from building to
building, pushing my way through the crowds to the front (this is a socially
acceptable practice), I couldn’t help but think that the number of tourists
pale in comparison to the 9,000 inhabitants of earlier times. I am horrible at
estimating (I believe my brother inherited that skill instead of me), so I
can’t make a good guess of how many people were visiting the Forbidden City
that day. But it was very crowded and with crowds, there is chaos. I can’t
imagine how the Emperors kept control of the palace. However, if you relate the
governance of the Forbidden City to Modern-day China, it is still hard to
imagine how the Party stays in control of the 1.3 billion residents. Moments
like this make me realize the complexity and secretive nature of Chinese
politics.
After the Forbidden City tour, I
tagged along with some friends to the popular Wangfujing Avenue. We had lunch
at a McDonalds, my first Chinese McDonalds experience. It wasn’t too much
different other than the portion sizes; it is much smaller here. I won’t go
into too much detail because I am planning a ‘Foods of China’ post in the near
future. The restaurant happened to be in a fancy mall where a live
advertisement was talking place. The advertisement included dancing teeth and
two performers dancing to Michael Jackson songs. At the end of the performance,
they mentioned something about a brand of toothpaste and reminded everyone to
brush their teeth! It was quite interesting to experience.
Just across the street was a
foreign bookstore. My friend and I split off from the rest of the group so we
could check out the books. I ended up buying two Chinese language-learning
books: Chinese Idioms and Chinese Breeze Graded Reader Level 3. I have read
some of the Chinese Breeze series before and was quite happy to see that
instead of costing about $5-7 in the US, it was only $2 here. I may have to
stock up on these before going home.
The next part of my day isn’t for
the wary hearted. My friends and I had caught wind of the epic rivalry between
Beijing Guoan Football Club and the Tianjin Teda Football Club. Their match was
this weekend and the tickets were already sold out. This didn’t stop us though.
We set off for Worker’s Stadium in the Sanlitun district. My friend Jarek and I
arrived to the stadium before the other group of guys we were meeting up with
had arrived.
We saw loads of stands selling
concessions, jerseys, scarves, hats, and etc. We both wanted to get some
jerseys (which I later bought for about $13), but first we needed to get
tickets. In America, scalpers are relatively easy to find with their “I need
tickets” signs. In China, it is a different story. I walked around asking
person after person, “我们没有比赛票。我们可以在哪儿卖？
(We don’t have tickets. Where can we buy some.” I quickly picked up on a new
vocabulary word, 黄牛 meaning scalper. It literally translates to
“yellow cow.” I don’t know the origin, but I learned to use it quickly. I asked
everyone around if they were yellow cows. No one laughed, just replied with a
polite ‘no.’ As the gates opened, I changed tactics and asked the people
selling merchandise. One woman working a
stand told me to go into a building located behind her. I knew some of the
characters and when I looked up the meaning of the ones I didn’t know, I
learned the sign meant, “Sell your tickets here.” I thought it was clever that
America and China shared this same aspect of scalpers asking the customer to
“sell the ticket” when in reality they were buying the ticket. As I went
inside, I asked the man at a desk if they sold tickets. He laughed in a nervous
way and said no they can’t sell tickets here. At the moment it occurred to me
that even as corrupt and non-rule-following China is sometimes, I could be
breaking a law. I immediately left the building and went in front of the
entrance to the stadium to gather myself. We met some others trying to find
tickets, so we traded numbers with them promising to inform each other if we
had any luck. Shortly after, I found a yellow cow, but he was fresh out of
tickets. I asked him where I could find another yellow cow and he gave me a
very generic answer of, “Over there” with his finger pointing into a sea of
people. Feeling as if it was a lost cause, we almost gave up. I noticed the
yellow cow saw us standing around and no longer looking for tickets. He called
someone on his phone and at the same time the rest of our group showed up. Now
instead of needing two tickets, we needed seven.
But then I heard, in English, “Hello, you need tickets?” It was another
yellow cow. The phone call was for us! The man spoke to me explaining that he
had VIP cards that could get us into the game. His friend would lead each member
of our group one at a time into the stadium and then the last person would pay.
I was extremely skeptical of these cards so I need to let him know I wasn’t the
average foreigner. I switched into Chinese and asked him to let me see the
cards. He continued to explain the cards while I looked at them; they looked
legitimate. I told him I needed to discuss with my friends. Some were on board,
others were not. I told two of my friends to bombard the guy with questions
about the football stadium so I could buy time to call my roommate and check if
it was a scam. Turns out that VIP cards are real and it wasn’t a scam. At $30 a
person, we thought we would try it. I picked my friend Scott to go first
because his Chinese is pretty good and I thought he could hold his own if
anything started to go bad. As the man’s friend took each of my friends one by
one, I got a lot of Chinese practice with the yellow cow, whose name is Fan.
Fan was actually a high-level ticket promoter in China, doing things for the
NBA in China as well. We traded contacts in case I wanted tickets to any other
sporting events in China (which is actually hard because the online platforms
aren’t developed so ticket sales are still mostly through box offices). After
three friends were inside, I noticed that the man guiding my friends had a new
hat, one of my friends. I laughed and figured he took it to disguise himself
from the security and ticket checkers (my assumption was correct). I called inside to my friends to make sure
everything was okay, and they said it was working. Only one of them was
actually sitting down because the man would have to take us through another
ticket check to get to our seats. Then suddenly, my phone call was dropped, I
was out of minutes and my phone was utterly useless. This is point in the story
where it starts to get shady.
As my last friend left me, I saw the guys from earlier that were also
looking for tickets. I asked them if that had any, but they had no such luck. I
told them about our deal and I offered to introduce them. Fan explained the
package and then they asked me, “This isn’t one of those schemes where the guys
take you inside and then beat you up is it?” It had never crossed my mind, but
I was much bigger than Fan and his friend and it was a public place so I didn’t
really worry about it. The foreigners seemed interested, but wanted to see how
the package went down with me before committing to it. To make matters more complex, a host and a few cameramen came up to me and asked, "Do you speak Chinese?" They wanted me to predict the score of the match. I did my best predicting the score with my mind on other things. The host told me if my prediction was correct, I would appear on the jumbotron at the end of the game (I guessed the final score to be 2-1, advantage Guoan). Then the man who guided all
of my friends returned and it was my turn. Fan asked me to pay him outside the
gate, but I refused because that wasn’t part of the deal. He gave me a little
bit of a hard time, but I wasn’t going to budge. His reasoning for the early
payment was because his friend wanted to watch the game so we could just go
into the stadium together and Fan would be able to go home. This was fishy
because my friends who I had just met were also wanting the deal where standing
right there. I explained that Fan had just agreed to help them into the game
and his friend would have to come out again anyways, so he could just bring out
the money. Fan looked a little disappointed because I had outwitted him. He
conceded and I went into the stadium.
I met up with my friends at gate 27, but our seats were at gate 18. The
man wanted the money and since he spoke no English, I did my best to sternly
say that we had to be sitting down before I paid him. He took my friends in two
at a time. Each trip took about 8 minutes. When it was just me and two others,
Jarek and Scott, I told them that they would be the eyes and ears on the
inside. If anything went wrong, they needed to get a hold of me before I gave
the money to the man. The man took them away and I was alone. The thought of
Fan and his friend isolating me on purpose ran through my mind again, but it
was quickly pushed away once the 6 military men march by me. They marched by me
a total of 4 times in 25 minutes. I wondered where this guy was, and more
importantly, where were my friends?
Suddenly, I see Scott and four others leave Gate 18. No sign of the
Chinese man. After asking what happened, they said that he got detained. As he
was taking Scott and Jarek through, a police officer threw the man up against
the wall and 7 other police officers starting beating him up. Scott lowered his
head and continued on while Jarek stopped to watch. Eventually, the five of
them were all together. One of the other guys had been dropped off at the
bathroom by the Chinese man to help avoid suspicious. We called our friend at
the bathroom and told him to come find us outside gate 18. We found out that
when he was taken in, the Chinese man had slipped an attendant that figured out
what he was doing a 50 kuai bill (about $10). We started for the entrance
because none of us were interested in the game anymore. They seemed a little
bummed until I told them that I hadn’t paid the guy. Everyone started jumping
and high-fiving each other while giggling like little school girls. Then Scott
says, “Well… Jarek and I still have the VIP cards too.” We were all even more
excited, but then we figured that we should return them to Fan outside if he
was still there because he has my contact information.
We found Fan outside on the phone pacing franticly. I could only catch
some of what he was saying because he was speaking Chinese so fast. I heard him
say, “There are only six out here, where is the seventh?” I then told him that
one of our buddies had distanced himself from Fan and the game because we were
all pretty nervous still. I gave him the cards back and Fan apologized, “I am
sorry I ruined your guys’ first football game in Beijing. Want me to find you
more tickets?” NO! We had had enough excitement for the night. We told him
thanks and he felt extremely bad. We didn’t lose any money, only our friends’
hat.
Reflecting on the experience, the man might have been supposed to get my
money before “getting arrested,” as part of the scheme, but somehow we avoided
it all. We ended up going to the Sports Bar outside the stadium for burgers and
watched the game on the big screen TVs there. I wish I would have gotten to see my face of the jumbotron..
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| Scott and me at the Sports Bar afterwards trying to look tough in our Guo'an gear. |
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