Beijing, October 5, 2008, Sunday
Trip Start
Sep 26, 2008
1
10
31
Trip End
Oct 18, 2008
Beijing,
China
Saturday, March 28, 2009
I was meeting PingPing at Qiánmén station today, later than usual. This time around, our appointment was set up at one in the afternoon, so I was really in no hurry after I had got out of bed. Of course, it didn't help me any in terms of sleeping in. Just as I had known it would not, but then again, I didn't have to kick off my day with anything like a running start. And that was something.
She was fifteen minutes late, but we were in no hurry whatsoever. Our plan for today was some acrobatics. I expressed a wish to see one show as according to what I know, Bĕijīng has some of the best acrobatics shows around. PingPing had done some research and come up with the conclusion that the place to go for it was the Wansheng Acrobatics Theatre. And in order to get there we had to meet at Qiánmén station and then do quite a bit of walking to boot
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. In addition to it, PingPing knew only roughly where the theatre was, so she had to ask around some for direction. Which inevitably led to cases like one guy telling her one thing and another guy a completely different thing. And then, even when what the third one said kind of resembled what one of the first two had said, it was still by no means a waterproof evidence that we were finally on the right track.At one point we saw a huge queue on one of the pavements.
"What is it?" I asked.
"People are buying train tickets," PingPing explained.
"Here? And why not in the station?"
I didn't get my head fully around the explanation he offered me. In any event, most of them youngsters, even if not all, were now queuing in an endless column in order to eventually enter a small door, which might have been something of a local travel agency. The long week off coming to its close tomorrow, they were now heading back to wherever they had arrived in Bĕijīng from. I would've probably bought the ticket a few days in advance if I had been one of them, as standing in that neverending queue didn't quite fit the description of a good time for me. But then again, personal preferences are exactly that - personal. So who could tell for sure? Maybe that was exactly what they - or some of them, at least - craved for. Maybe that was the grand finale to a week-long vacation in Chinese capital. Well, it is true that not many faces in that queue betrayed anything even remotely resembling a bliss, but I was just passing by, so I might have missed out on something there, as well.
Anyway, after some search, PingPing finally sniffed the trail of the Wansheng Acrobatics Theatre and when we eventually reached the place, she pointed at a building vaguely resembling the French-style architecture from the colonial era and said:
"This building is more than hundred years old."
That was our theatre
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. It was located just off the Tianqiao Nandajie, at Beiwei Lu, and actually not difficult to find at all. Provided you knew where to look, of course. The entrance to the building itself was not an obvious thing even if the theatre nicely and conveniently faced the main street. In order to go in and buy some tickets we had to pass under a small stony arch and squeeze through a side alley, worthy of any hutong I had seen so far.The tradition of acrobatics seems to go a long way back in this Tianqiao area of Xuanwu, the humble district of Bĕijīng, where street performers were an everyday staple since olden times and earliest history of the city. Here, at the border of Xuanwu and Chongwen districts, along the central road into the City where the Emperor and other bigwigs once resided, it was where it all happened. The majority of commoners, who usually ended up short-changed when the big roles were handed out, were restricted to working outside the city walls, and kept to the poor districts. But this was a lively and crowded area, with a lot of going on around and colourful and healthy everyday life, so street acrobats, buskers, martial arts experts, opera performers, they all were competing for attention from passers-by and bystanders.
So this particular theatre was born from this long-standing tradition of street performances, and after 1949 and the birth of "New China", it moved into its present indoors venue. By extension, the locals still seem to care very much about their very own Acrobatic Show and the Old Theatre, which should be enough to lend it a long lease on life
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. Therefore this historic theatre still stands proudly, together with its modern marble-and-gold neighbour just down the street and to the west, the Tianqiao Theatre, which has been the home of the National Ballet of China, for which the acrobatics theatre has regularly been mistaken.Inside, a very nice and helpful guy sold us two tickets, explaining first that those more expensive ones buy, as expected, better seats, closer to the stage. But then he was quick to add that no one expected anything like the capacity crowd tonight, so should we come reasonably early, the venue should be empty enough and we could sit on some of those best places without really unseating anyone. Out of two shows on offer, the afternoon and evening one, we decided to attend the latter one, as it lasted longer and the ticket price was the same. And that was it there until seven thirty.
Outside, on a small square alongside the Beiwei Lu and between the Wansheng Acrobatics Theatre and Tianqiao Theatre, PingPing and I took a few pictures and checked the statues of Eight Eccentrics of Tianqiao. Eight funny guys, wonderfully modelled by some creative and inspired sculptor, were a marvellous lot, holding speeches, riding donkey, bending over backwards while balancing a stack of jugs and plates on the forehead, furiously pacing around... You really had a feeling they were alive.
From there on we decided to go for a lunch. PingPing knew a restaurant in the neighbourhood which in its concept to a large extent resembled the one I had visited with Maggie a few days before
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. Some ten or fifteen minutes on foot from there, in one of the side streets she got me to a place called "Sansheng An"."A friend of mine is the owner here," she said.
The restaurant didn't look like much from the outside. An unassuming low building, with a number of mandatory red lanterns outside, not something you'd rate too highly at first sight. But once you got in and passed through the building, which was a kind of reception, you found yourself in a sprawling sìhéyuàn, a large enclosed garden with numerous low inner buildings, a genuine anachronism amidst the looming high-rises of the surrounding area. A really beautiful place. Almost each of those buildings could take guests in. Some were designated for visitors like PingPing and me, and some were able to accommodate groups. Whoever was the owner, they obviously attempted to give the place an air of style and set it apart from the rest of the pack. There were books around to read, magazines and DVDs. All for guests to enjoy.
And the food was all-vegetarian, again prepared like it was not.
Nobody was there when we entered. Except waiters. In spite of relatively cold weather, PingPing and I decided to eat outside, in the garden. As the whole place was walled off, as a true sìhéyuàn should be, we felt no wind, so on the whole it was pleasant. Since we had quite some time to go on our hands, there was no need to hurry anywhere.
Looking around, even for an intrinsically non-businessman type like me, it was evident that running expenses for such a place couldn't be low
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. Also, seeing no one except the two of us around, I couldn't help asking:"Do they ever have any guests here?"
"Oh yes," PingPing maintainedd. "The place is always full."
"You mean... always?"
Well, this "always" eventually didn't mean always literally. But at those peak times. In any case, the place was doing a brisk business. At least according to PingPing.
However, we were the only ones there during our entire stay. And we didn't really hurry out. And still, once we left, we left the waiters once again only to themselves.
There was still some time ahead of us to while away so we decided to go to the nearby Taoranting Park. Today it's a thing called an AAAA national scenic spot. I suppose it's something like spot of a high sightseeing value and yet not high enough to gain international acclaim and make it to lists like UNESCO World Heritage. Something like a four-star category, I would say.
Well, that's what it is today, and back then it was a place where intellectuals got together for some brainy discussions and exchanges, since most of Bĕijīng's gardens were reserved only for imperial families and all the toffs and bigwigs on their coattails. Also, a long time ago, there was this guy working as an official in the Ministry of Works who had a pavilion erected at this spot and named it Taoran. So when they built the park in 1952, there was little doubt as to its name. The park today has a lake with a number of pavilions scattered along its shore
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. So all in all, it did make for a pleasant stroll while we waited for the acrobatics.At one point the twilight fell over Bĕijīng, shrouding the city in ever darker colours, and at dusk we left the park. It all just coincided with the time to go back to the Wansheng Acrobatics Theatre.
The evening show at the theatre wasn't exactly a sellout. Some thirty or forty people showed up and that was the entire crowd the acrobats were going to perform for. And compared to the afternoon show, we were almost a crowd, indeed. Only a handful of westerners you could almost mistake for lost, emerged from the theatre when the first performance was over and I inevitably asked myself what it was like for the performers to go up on stage in a chronically empty venue. Less than ten people came out, expression on their faces pretty bland. I suppose, whatever the troupe inside was like, they were really up against it attempting to perform to the best of their abilities for just a few stray tourists. But then again, if there are two shows every day, day in day out, it's also difficult to imagine how many tourists there would have to be all the time in Bĕijīng for the show to be reasonably sold. Maybe they just want to be open every day, whenever there is a tourist to accommodate, even if it means audience is spread very thin.
Anyway, the acrobats must have felt better seeing probably three or even four times as many of us as there were people there the show before
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. And even as such, we were really just a few. And in stark contrast to the night in the Bĕijīng opera the other evening, when I was one of only two westerners in the audience, now it was PingPing's turn to stand out. There was one lady with two kids who we at first suspected might be a Chinese, but then her western husband appeared and she also spoke to kids, and we realised she was Japanese living probably in the States. All others were Caucasians.And the show was rather good, in fact. Seems this particular troupe have in their more than fifty years of existence achieved an international acclaim and toured such countries like UK, Germany, US, Canada and Japan. Which is no mean feat. And by the looks of it, they thoroughly deserved it. They were rather entertaining and everybody in the crowd seemed to enjoy themselves. In effect just a huge bunch of kids, they did things which were sometimes amusing and sometimes outright astonishing. From innocuous juggling of things like plates, cards and hats, to some balancing acts like monocycles, stacks of glasses filled with water and so on, to some breath-stopping high-wire and long-pole acts, and also anything in between. Along the way we were occasionally treated to the sight of impossibly bent bodies at such ridiculous angles that up until then I thought only geometry knew. Here in the Wansheng Acrobatics Theatre, though, I realised some people, too - at least if they are from China - may literally bend over backwards, curl into some of the most improbable forms, more resembling law-book paragraph marks than anything human, and then unwind back into a perfectly human-looking body again. Like they and I didn't even belong to the same species.
Such acts like they performed for us inevitably demanded hours of hard work and practice every day. I wondered how much those little guys were missing out on in everyday life and how long careers like theirs could last. Well, whenever you want to achieve something truly good, you must sacrifice a part of yourself to it.
But what after that?
