Modern glitter can't hide Beijing's charms

As we pass the Great Wall we feel as if our journey across the world is beginning. Picture / Jim Eagles

Our 9107km train journey from Beijing to Helsinki started with ... well, actually it just started.

At the appointed time of 7.40am, without so much as an admonitory whistle let alone an excited toot, the Trans Mongolian Express quietly pulled away from the noisy chaos of the huge Beijing Railway Station and headed north towards the Great Wall of China and the barbarian lands beyond.

We made up for the lack of official fanfare by standing in the swaying corridor of our carriage quaffing paper cups of sweet Russian bubbly.

It seemed the least we could do to celebrate the start of a train journey nearly six times the distance between North Cape and Bluff - not that you can travel that by rail - which would carry us the full width of Asia and Europe.

Ahead lay the the teeming plains of China once enclosed by the Great Wall, the dusty emptiness of the Gobi Desert, the magnificent grassy plains of Mongolia, the icy steppes of Siberia, the Ural Mountains which divide Europe from Asia, the ancient forests of Mother Russia, the baroque splendours of Moscow and St Petersburg, and journey's end in the modern European Union city of Helsinki.

Ahead, too, lay nine days - with a few breaks along the way - living in a tiny four-berth compartment shared with strangers, learning to bribe people to do their jobs, adjusting to five time zones, communicating in four different languages, attuning our bodily needs to the idiosyncrasies of the toilet system, leaping off at stopping points to buy food and surviving the risk posed by the train's habit of departing without warning.

Even today, with reasonably modern trains plying the route, and in our case having the way smoothed as part of an experienced group tour, this is not a trip to be undertaken lightly.

But it remains one of the great journeys, embracing some of the world's most magnificent cities, crossing some of its most extraordinary landscapes and following a route used by countless generations of traders, explorers, adventurers, diplomats and warriors.

You can begin this sort of Eurasian train odyssey from many places - Vladivostok, Sovetskaya Gavan, Moscow, St Petersburg - but for me Beijing is the appropriate start point.

After all, for centuries Beijing was effectively centre of the world - indeed the Meridian Gate in the Forbidden City was so named because the Meridian Line at the centre of the universe was believed to pass through it - and the place from which everything started.

It was certainly the start point for many of the great trade routes, in particular the caravans which followed roughly the same path as we would be taking to transport tea to the nobility of Russia and on to the salons of Europe.

These days, of course, the situation is much the same with a revitalised China once more opening its doors to the world, taking its place at the centre of global affairs and sending forth vast quantities of goods to the rest of the world.

As part of that process - and with the added deadline of hosting the Olympic Games in two years - Beijing is being frantically transformed into a modern international capital.

You can feel the energy in the air as millions of workers toil night and day to erect gleaming new office blocks, build roads, manicure gardens - at a roadside park I watched while a young woman in a power suit and holding a clipboard supervised one old man clipping roadside grass with scissors and another sweeping the top of a hedge - upgrade the footpaths and, above all, create magnificent new sporting facilities.

Walk along Beijing's main thoroughfares, with congested concrete motorways, giant billboards for Coke and Nike, glass towers named after Ernst & Young or Sony, and forests of building cranes waving like praying mantis, and you could already be in almost any major city anywhere in the world.

But, as we had discovered, the scruffy, loveable old China is never far behind the modern facade.

Less than a block from our downtown hotel, for instance, is one of the city's hutongs - areas of narrow lanes with tiny dwellings built around a central courtyard - where life goes on much as it always has.

If your body clock is still operating on New Zealand time these are great places for an early morning wander to see food vendors cooking breakfast on the roadside; itinerant tradesmen fixing bicycle punctures and torn flipflops, sharpening knives and cutting keys with a file on the footpath; aged grandparents enjoying a morning hoik on to the road; families doing tai chi; old men making miniature wooden furniture; street sweepers cleaning up with twig brooms; and young men blowing animals out of molten sugar.

This is where to come if you need to go - if you see what I mean - because most hutongs don't have sewerage so the authorities have provided lots of public toilets, all reasonably modern, well-signposted ... and easily identifiable from their smell.

It's also worth making a visit here at the end of a long day traipsing round markets, palaces and temples to have a traditional foot massage from a mini-skirted young woman with long black hair and fingers of steel, an experience which - for me anyway - hovered on the borderline between agony and ecstasy, but certainly leaves your feet refreshed at the end.

In places you can find the city's old name remembered in the delicious Peking duck - one restaurant advertised "peeking duck" and the dead ducks hanging in the window did seem to be peering round the corner - or the fascinating Peking opera.

What's more, while China may today be producing nylon shirts, pirated DVDs and electronic toys for the world, in the back streets you can still find traditional industries which have been practised for centuries.

Visit a cloisonne factory where workers produce amazing enamelled vases, plates and ornaments entirely by hand, using techniques of hammering, firing and painting not very different to those of the Yuan dynasty, established by Kublai Khan 700 years ago.

Alternatively, tour a silk factory where silkworms are raised and the threads of their cocoons harvested in much the same manner as they were in the reign of the Yellow Emperor some 3000 years BC - at a time when my ancestors would at best have been wearing deer skins - though the weaving and printing of the fabric is decidedly modern.

And despite all the modernisation, there are also plenty of extraordinary monuments to Chinese history still to be seen, places like the Forbidden City, the Summer Palace, the Temple of Heaven, the Lama Temple, Tiananmen Square and, from a more recent era, the mausoleum of Mao Zedong.

Today the spread of apartment and office blocks means the ancient palaces are not the commanding figures they would have been when the tea caravans were leaving the city, but once you're inside they are still magnificent.

The Forbidden City, for instance, has 8810 rooms and is said to be the largest wooden structure on earth - one of many Chinese structures given such world-beating titles - but it's not the size that is so impressive but the beauty of the painting, the elegance of the roof-lines in their golden tiles and the harmony of the overall design.

The Ming Emperors who created this palace complex had 3000 concubines - the mind boggles - and they required the mound at its heart to be built in the shape of the character for the earth so they would literally be standing on top of the world.

The Summer Palace is a beautiful park - the largest imperial garden in the world according to our guide - filled with exquisite pavilions, towers, lakes, islands, statues, paintings, gardens and covered walks.

The Empress Dowager Xi Xi, who made this her permanent home from about 1880, had 3000 eunuchs rather than concubines, required 128 dishes to be prepared for every meal - she only ate one - and obviously had a sense of humour because she used money provided for a modern Chinese navy to build a huge marble paddleship where she liked to dine.

But of all these extraordinary places I think my favourite is Beihai Park, close to the Forbidden City, probably because it is just as remarkable as the better known sites but tends to be ignored by tourist groups.

As a result you can wander peacefully round the tranquil lakes and gardens, admire the superb temples and climb up to the majestic White Dagoba, with only families, courting couples and the occasional foreign backpacker for company.

The day we visited Beihai Park was also memorable for the way we got back. A taxi there cost CNY15 ($3) but when the time came to return one driver wanted CNY40 and another just snapped "Not worth it" and turned away.

We had just resigned ourselves to walking to the nearest metro station when a young trishaw driver offered to take us for CNY20.

This was a magical experience as he took shortcuts down alleys, zoomed through parks and avoided traffic jams by nipping on to the path. At one intersection a portly policewoman stepped out and blew a whistle to signal that he should stop and the resultant squeaking of brakes made her laugh so much her hat fell off and blew out into the traffic.

After recovering her hat she came over and offered us much smiling advice which we couldn't understand - I suspect she was warning of the dangers of dud brakes - and then cleared a path through the traffic for the trishaw.

It was so much fun we decided to give our driver a tip ... and then couldn't find the money.

That amiable attitude to tourists is obviously official policy. At Tiananmen Square, for instance, a police car cruised by and asked us if we were being bothered by hawkers. And in the Silk Market - knock-off central - there were placards listing nasty words which must not be used by by the stallholders and asking customers to complain to police if they did.

It's all rather different from the reign of Chairman Mao or, for that matter, during the hundreds of years when successive emperors tried to seal out the outside world by building the Great Wall. I've always thought it a little ironic that not only did the wall fail to keep outsiders away, today it is one of China's biggest tourist attractions, thronged every day with thousands of those same foreigners.

But a visit to one of the restored sections near Beijing shows what an extraordinary engineering feat it was.

I went to the section at Mutianyu and, scorning the gondola ride to the top, panted and sweated up the thousands of steep steps to the top, along the way running the gauntlet of hordes of souvenir sellers waving their "I climbed the Great Wall" T-shirts and crying "I remember you when you come back." And they are nothing if not persistent.

At the top I admired the view while sucking on my water bottle, and an Australian who arrived about the same time observed, "Whew, water tastes as good as a cold beer right now." Out of the darkness of a nearby watchtower came a sepulchral voice saying, "I have cold water and cold beer right here. Look no further."

On the way down it was almost impossible to get through the throng of people shouting, "I remember you, you buy now, you promised."

The best response to this harassment came from Steve Takiari, a Maori living in Perth, who walked through the blockade singing, "I remember you, you're the one who made my dreams come true ... " and received a round of applause for his efforts ... as well as being left alone.

Souvenir sellers aside, this section of the wall is quite peaceful, and it's a charming experience to just rest quietly at the top of one of the watchtowers, looking at the way the wall climbs along the serried ranks of hills, before finally disappearing into the mist.

A wall was first built here by the Qin dynasty when China was unified some 2500 years ago, then rebuilt in granite along the present lines by the more modern Ming dynasty using, so our Lonely Planet guidebook advised, 60 million cubic metres of stone and taking more than 100 years to finish.

The result certainly looks impressive with solid stone walls, mostly 5-7m high and about as thick, often standing at the top of razorback ridgelines, with battlements and watchtowers making it even more formidable. It's hard to imagine barbarians on horseback even making a dent in it but, as Genghis Khan is reputed to have said, "The strength of a wall relies on the courage of those who defend it."

The wall didn't stop Genghis conquering China and it didn't stop us leaving either, though we did see it snaking over the hilltops as our train chugged through the hills and valleys north of Beijing.

These days it no longer forms China's border but as it fell behind it did seem a sign that our Chinese sojourn had ended and our journey across the world had begun.

Getting there
Singapore Airlines flies 16 times a week from New Zealand direct to Singapore. From Singapore, passengers can choose from 21 weekly flights to Beijing. For the latest fares and for further information visit the website link below.

Getting around
Perth-based Travel Directors runs regular tours from Beijing to Helsinki by train, entitled Beyond the Trans-Siberian, including time in China, Mongolia and Russia. Tours are almost fully inclusive and cost A$10,847 (just over $13,000).

Further information
Email info@traveldirectors.com.au or see the website link below.

Alternatively contact Travel Directors' New Zealand representatives, Go Holidays, on 0800 464646 or click on the link below.