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and some cash, we were o¤. After a long, four-movie flight we landed
in Shanghai, cleared immigration, and flew on to Beijing, where we
would recuperate from jet lag and relax a few days.
Our first sightseeing trip was to Tiananmen Square, where the fol-
lowing year hundreds of pro-democracy demonstrators were massacred.
Pictures of the square are deceiving, not even beginning to suggest how
big it really is. It can easily hold a million people. Within the square
are the Museum of the Chinese Revolution, the Mao Zedong Mau-
soleum, and Tiananmen Gate with its fifty-foot-high portrait of Mao.
We got in line to see Mao's tomb and were immediately pulled aside
by a soldier and told with much waving and pointing to go over to an
adjacent building, where we were instructed to leave everything we were
carrying. Nothing, including cameras, was allowed to be taken into
the tomb. Armed soldiers quickly moved people past the glass enclo-
sure that held Mao's embalmed body, allowing visitors only a few sec-
onds' glance before they were hustled out the exit. This worship of a
dead body is bizarre to me, but clearly Mao was still revered by a lot
of Chinese.
The next day we visited the Beijing Zoo. China, of course, is the
home of the giant panda, and the Beijing Zoo has donated a number
of pandas to zoos around the world. I figured if any place would have
an outstanding panda display, it would be here.
We took a taxi to the zoo, paid admission, and went in. The day be-
fore had been cold, and this day was even colder, and the zoo was bleak,
the trees bare and very few animals visible. The panda exhibit consisted
of a rather small cage with steel bars. Inside the cage were a water dish,
a few pieces of bamboo, and two rather dirty pandas. I'd certainly ex-
pected something else. It was quite depressing.
On our last day in Beijing we went to see the Great Wall, one sec-
tion of which is not far from the city. The Great Wall, the largest struc-
ture ever made by humans, was built as a defense against raids by the
nomadic peoples of Mongolia. Originally constructed in several sepa-
rate sections, the wall was completed in about 200 B.C. A thousand
years later it was breached when Genghis Khan and his army conquered
much of China. During the first 150 years of the Ming Dynasty
(1368-1644), the wall was repaired and extended to a total length of
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