Having rattled off the sites from Beijing’s ancient history, we now come to the modern stuff. Again, I’ll start with Tiananmen Square. I was supposed to do this on the same day as the National Museum and Forbidden City but, because this coincided with Putin’s visit to the capital, my booking was abruptly cancelled. I’d hoped Zelenskyy would heed my call to escalate the counter offensive to usher his swift departure; thankfully Putin went back to Russia of his own volition a couple days later so I was able to visit. Tiananmen Square will loom large in many people’s minds because of the massacre of student protesters that occurred there in 1989. Yet the place’s modern significance really goes back to 1949, when Mao declared the People’s Republic of China. Since the revolution it’s been repurposed to symbolise the triumph of the new order over the old, epitomised by the giant portrait of Mao that now hangs on the Meridian Gate entrance to the Forbidden City. Flanked by this and the Chairman Mao Memorial Hall as you stare at the Monument to the People’s Heroes in the middle of the square, there can be no doubt as to the Communist Party’s predominance which my trip to China has shown reverberates well beyond Tiananmen.
With this in mind, it was time to pay my respects to the man who made it all happen. I followed the Chairman’s gaze from the Meridian Gate to his mausoleum, with the apt impression that I was being watched as I walked across the square. I was very excited to visit the Chairman Mao Memorial Hall because it marks the second addition to my delightfully morbid tally of aiming to see all five embalmed corpses of former communist dictators. No photos were allowed inside so I’ll describe my experience here. You enter to a beaming marble statue of the Chairman before being ushered into the main hall. I was impressed by how well-preserved he was, especially compared to my memories of Lenin. I suppose it shows how far the science of embalming corpses had come in the intervening fifty years (the marvels of the modern age!). There’s a second floor with memorials to other revolutionary figures but this unfortunately wasn’t open. I couldn’t believe how many visitors brought flowers to pay their respects to a man whose death count eclipsed Hitler’s and Stalin’s combined. I suppose a skewed demographic seeing as they’d come here to begin with but nonetheless a pretty disconcerting window into the potency of Communist myth-making.
Tiananmen’s final landmark is the Great Hall of the People. Being sad enough to have watched some of the 2022 party congress, I was gutted that this wasn’t open. If I needed a further reason to pursue a career in politics, it’d surely be to garner enough caché to merit an audience at the Great Hall as Putin had so enjoyed.
Unsatisfied with the level of pomp and circumstance, I headed to the Military Museum of the Chinese People’s Revolution for good measure. If you’re looking for unadulterated jingoism then look no further. The place was awash with tanks, guns and stirring exhortations that would make any Chinese boy look for the nearest army recruitment office. Comrade Xi was plastered all over the museum, sporting some fabulous military garb that makes our fancy dress collection at home seem bland.
By contrast, the Lugou Bridge and nearby Museum of the War of Chinese People’s Resistance Against Japanese Aggression were quite measured. Following on from my post on Shenyang, if the September 18th incident occasioned the war with Japan, then it was here at the Lugou Bridge that the fighting began in earnest. It’s better known in the West as the Marco Polo Bridge because it was described in the Venetian’s writings when he visited China in the 13th century. Indeed, the splendid bridge is still adorned with stone lions along its railings, some of which date back to his travels. What this site lacked in informative displays I found in spades at the museum just down the road. In certain respects it echoed what I’d seen at other museums, particularly in its inflating of the Communist Party’s role in the war. Yet the tone was much more nuanced, giving credit to China’s international allies and, most surprisingly, the Nationalists. This was all the more remarkable given this is the definitive museum on the Second World War in China. It suggests that, provided they genuflect sufficiently to Xi and the party, museums enjoy a surprising degree of latitude to influence their own historical narratives. An encouraging note to end on for once.
