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Beijing Food
The Chinese can seem priggish and straight- laced (read Confucian), but if there's one big steamy love affair in their lives, it's got to be food. Dining is a kind of social lubricant where the Chinese are most relaxed. It's the meeting ground for romance, the context in which business deals are cemented, old friendships revived and new acquaintances forged. As a commodity, food in China has periodically been in very short supply and there’s a collective memory of shortages and famine. Food is life, and as such life is food.
If you want to see the Chinese at ease, listen to a Chinese restaurant in full swing. Mealtimes buzz with energy, for dining is above all a social event and this is where the Chinese are at their most gregarious and appealing. There's no shortage of theatre: the energetic ritual of toasting fuels much laughter and applause. Dinners are warm, relaxed and communal occasions where dishes are shared, cigarettes liberally handed round, glasses punctiliously refilled by the host and there's never any squabbling over the bill.
Ballooning incomes in the capital and the droves of foreigners coming to town have provoked a Cultural Revolution of sorts in Beijing's restaurant scene. And even the most insistent diners will meet their match in Beijing's doggedly inventive restaurant scene. There was a time when Beijing's humdrum restaurant selection was enough to make you throw in the tea towel. Times have changed, and once you’ve sampled the institutional delicacy of Peking duck you can let rip on other recipes.
The kitchen gloves have truly come off: with more money sloshing around town, chefs from afar have congregated in Beijing to feed the latest fad. If it's Chinese you want, you can't choose a better place to start, for chefs from all over the land are in town. And don't fret if you crave more variety, China's open door policy kicked open the kitchen hatch to world food long ago. Just about any fickle fancy meets it match, so plunge in and start twiddling those chopsticks - some of your best Beijing memories could well be tabletop ones. And despite the rich aromas around town, you won't pay through the nose for it all - some truly fantastic cheap eats await And if you don't mind spending a bit more well, the sky's the limit.
Ming Tombs 
Shisan Ling
About 50km northwest of Beijing lies the final resting place of 13 of the 16 Ming emperors at the Ming Tombs (Shisan Ling; Tel 6076 1156/1334/1435; admission RMB 20 for each tomb; open 8am-5:30pm daily). The Confucian layout and design may intoxicate erudite visitors, but some find the necropolis lifeless and ho-hum. Confucian shrines lack the vibrancy and colour of Buddhist or Taoist temples, and their motifs can be bewilderingly inscrutable.
Open to the public are three renovated tombs - Chang Ling, Ding Ling and ZhaoLing. Chang Ling, with its series of grand halls, is the most impressive. Ding Ling contains a series of subterranean interlocking vaults, while Zhao Ling is reasonably tranquil. The rest of the tombs are in various stages of dilapidation and are sealed off by locked gates.
The road leading up to the tombs is a 7km stretch called the 'Spirit Way'. It starts with a triumphal arch, then goes through the Great Palace Gate, where officials once had to dismount, and passes a giant bixi (a tortoise-like animal), which bears the largest stele in China. This is followed by a guard of 12 sets of stone animals. Your tour-bus driver could well Doppler-shift past them (preferring to spend half an hour at the routine Shisanling Reservoir instead), so kick up a fuss to see them.
Other interesting features are the loos at the Ming Tombs. The toilets at Chang Ling must be the best in China outside of a five-star hotel. The English notice advising visitors to behave at Chang Ling is also peerless. It reads: 'No fight and scrap. No rabble, no feudal fetish and sexy service. After close, don't stay or sleep in the open. Just so you're in the know.
The Great Wall
Also known to the Chinese as the '10,000 Li Wall, the Great Wall (Changcheng) stretches from Shanhaiguan on the east coast to Jiayuguan in the Gobi Desert.
Standard histories emphasise the unity of the wall. The 'original' wall was begun 2000 years ago during the Qin dynasty (221-207 BC), when China was unified under Emperor Qin Shihuang. Separate walls, constructed by independent kingdoms to keep out marauding nomads, were linked. The effort required hundreds of thousands of workers, many of them political prisoners, and 10 years of hard labour under General Meng Tian. An estimated 180 million cubic metres of rammed earth were used to form the core of the original wall, and legend has it that one of the building materials used was the bodies of deceased workers.
The wall never really did perform its function as a defence line. As Genghis Khan supposedly said, 'The strength of a wall depends on the courage of those who defend it.' Sentries could be bribed. However, it did work very well as a kind of elevated highway, transporting people and equipment across mountainous terrain. Its beacon tower system, using smoke signals generated by burning wolves' dung, transmitted news of enemy movements quickly back to the capital. To the west was Jiyuguan, an important link on the Silk Road, where there was a customs post of sorts and where unwanted Chinese were ejected through the gates to face the terrifying wild west.
During the Ming dynasty a determined effort was made to rehash the whole project, this time facing it with bricks and stone slabs – some 60 million cubic metres of these. This project took over 100 years, and the costs in human effort and resources were phenomenal.
The wall was largely forgotten after that. Lengthy sections of it have returned to dust and the wall might have disappeared totally had it not been rescued by the tourist industry. Several important sections have been rebuilt, kitted out with souvenir shops, restaurants and amusement-park rides, and formally opened to the public. The most touristed area of the Wall by far is Beijing; a magnetic levitation train is already in the planning stages, complete with tourist hordes hovering in from Beijing. Also renovated but less touristed are Simatai and Jinshanling. The Jiaoshan section at Shanhaiguan (see Shanhaiguan in the Excursions chapter for details) is also worth seeing, but to truly appreciate its magnificence, seeing the Wall au naturel, such as at the Yellow Flower Fortress (Huanghua Chang Cheng), is well worth the effort.
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