Sacred Truths

Tian Tan: the Temple of Heaven Part I

June 23, 2020 Emmy Graham Season 1 Episode 7
Sacred Truths
Tian Tan: the Temple of Heaven Part I
Show Notes Transcript

This is Part I of a story that spans over 30 years. In this personal narrative, Emmy takes us on an account of her journey to the city of Beijing in 1987.  More than just a travelogue, this is the story of the sacredness of place. It is also a story of love and friendship.  And it might be a story of connections and loyalty that cross over lifetimes.

"Listened to part 1 - SO FANTASTIC! I was raving about it...Such great storytelling and pacing. Your voice is SO good! " ES, Ashland, OR

"
This is like a Somerset Maughum/ E.M. Forester or Amy Tan novel... it's a complete novel/movie directed by Ang Lee! The colors, the sounds, the details, THAT VOICE!!!!, the romance, the sadness, the spiritual unity, the circling back to Tian Tan at the end....  I used up all the Kleenex in my pockets..." JLG, Atlanta, GA

www.sacred-truths.com

TIAN TAN- Part I
by Emmy Graham

The first time I went to China, I was 23 years old. I didn’t want to go.  I was quite frightened by the thought of visiting. I have no idea where this came from, as I only had a vague sense of the country and its culture. Even as a child, I had had strong premonitions that bad things had happened to me there, or would happen to me if I went there, and it frightened me terribly. When my family ate at Chinese restaurants I remember watching the Chinese wait staff with a feeling of unease that I could not explain.  Visions of pictures from the Cultural Revolution flickered through my mind – Chinese people being paraded about with dunce caps – hands tied behind backs; people being mocked and ridiculed, humiliated and hurt.  This was the early 1970s and I don’t know how I knew these things – had I seen images in the media?  I was terrified of the emotions they evoked within me. 

Years later, in my late forties, I participated in an all-day Kundalini white tantric yoga meditation where there were hundreds of us sitting in tight rows, paired off with a partner. My partner was a Caucasian woman who had spent her early childhood of the 1950s in Anhui, a province in southern China that by then I knew well, as her parents had been missionaries there when she was a child.  The entire day was spent staring into the eyes of our partner for eleven-minute intervals broken up by regular intervals allowing us to share our experiences with each other.  Half way through the day, as I approached the fifth hour of staring into her eyes, I watched her face transform one after the other into different people that  I recognized to be identities of past lives that she had led.  When it came time for discussion, she told me she had also seen a number of my past life experiences during the staring session.  One in particular was very vivid to her: that of a learned and scholarly Chinese man, the front part of my head shaven with the exception of a long braided ponytail, or queue down the back.  I didn’t even know if I believed in past lives, but she gave me a new revelation: the reason for my utterly baffling earlier terror and fear of China and my equally puzzling attraction to it later in my life may have been about unfinished, unresolved business.  China held so much for me, often raising complex emotional reactions that left me confused and tormented.  This theory of a past life experience there, one that involved tremendous fear or physical abuse of some sort, perhaps even ending in a very traumatic death, made sense to me.

 

So how was it that in 1987, at the age of 23, I ended up in China, alone and afraid, with very little money, no language skills, and with no useful knowledge of Chinese politics or history? 

This is a story of faith and destiny that spans over 30 years. It is a story of friendship. It is also a love story: about a love of place and a love of a people. And it might be a story of connections and loyalty that cross over lifetimes. 

 

After thousands of years of Imperial rule, China spent the early part of the 20th century as a fragmented country, enduring domination by warlords,  civil war, invasions, foreign influence and control, and a fierce revolution.

 

By the time I entered China in April 1987, the People’s Republic of China was almost 40 years old, and the Cultural Revolution had ended 11 years earlier, with Mao’s death. China had already initiated its first stage of economic reform. The first visit to the US by a Chinese president occurred a few years earlier and waves of Chinese students were being educated in the US. I was a young American woman who had been traveling solo around Asia for over a year on money I had saved teaching English in Japan. I decided to take the Trans-Siberian Railroad across Russia to Moscow. Then I learned that passengers boarded that train in Beijing. With a terrible sense of dread in the pit of my stomach, I knew I would have to enter China. 

To get to China, I boarded a train in the British colony of Hong Kong which took me to Shenzhen, a southern port city in China, where I was to change trains. As it took more time than I thought to get through customs, by the time I located my train to Beijing, it was nearly time to depart so I’d had no chance to look for a place to change my currency. I mistakenly thought I could use a traveler’s check in the train’s dining car, however there was no dining car. Instead, a woman came through with a hot food cart twice a day and only accepted cash. I would have welcomed the hot food, but since I had no money, I nibbled on a bag of granola I had from Hong Kong for the duration of the trip. I shared a hard sleeper with three other Chinese men. Other than the woman who came around with a hot food cart, and another woman who swept out the berth each day, I never saw another woman on the entire train. The men in my berth were loud and smoked cigarettes and drank a foul-smelling whiskey. They ate chicken and greasy pork ribs throwing the bones and the Styrofoam containers the food came in, right onto the floor. When the cleaning woman came around, she swept up the garbage, put it in her bucket, opened the window, and threw the whole mess out into the countryside, all the while chatting animatedly with the men. I had seen a lot of things in Asia, but I’d never experienced anything quite like this. I wondered what I was getting myself into. 

Looking out the window we passed large expanses of rice paddies, with workers wearing conical straw hats, up to their shins in mud and muck, the mountains in the background.  Sometimes the train passed through cities and factory towns, places dark and sooty. Three days later when I disembarked at the Beijing Railroad station, I felt like I had stepped onto a movie set.  Hoisting my worn but sturdy backpack onto my back, I walked down the train platform to a station full of people, noise and activity.

 

People were selling goods and food from blankets on the ground or from stalls; boys in pointy straw hats sat by their bicycle rickshaws waiting for customers.  I didn’t think people used rickshaws anymore.  I walked out of the station and stopped to check my map, making sure to stay west on the main road that would lead to the Beijing Hotel, the nicest hotel in Beijing, and the only place in Beijing to get a cup of coffee, and where I would change my money before heading on to a less expensive hotel for foreigners.  I had almost a week in Beijing and knew nothing about the city. Fortunately, on the train ride in I had met a young man from Germany named Matias who had been living in Beijing for over a year who helpfully circled points of interest on my map, and explained these logistics to me. 

The city of Beijing is roughly 3,000 years old established before the Qin Dynasty, which was the start of China’s Imperial reign in 221 BC. Many of the major land marks we see today such as the Forbidden City, the Ming Tombs and the Temple of Heaven, were built in the Ming Dynasty which began in the mid 14th century and were utilized until the end of the Qing dynasty, in 1911.

 

With my heavy bag on my back, I made my way to Chang’an Jie, one of the widest avenues I’d ever seen.  It would be a frequent site on the news two years later, when the west would witness tanks moving in on demonstrators in Tiananmen Square.  It was early afternoon and a chilly spring day. The streets were crowded and I noticed that many of the older people wore the traditional dark blue Mao suits and hats, whereas most of the working men and women wore long-sleeved white shirts and dark pants or skirts.  Although people stared at me, I felt safe.  As I headed west down Chang’an Jie, I was taken by the large pedestrian underpass, the enormous pedestrian overpasses, and the number of bicycles.  It wasn’t just that a lot of people were riding bicycles, but it looked as if everyone in the city relied on them as their primary mode of transportation. Women in skirts and stockings rode them to work.  Men pedaled with chickens and ducks strung up by their feet dangling from the handlebars.  Sometimes I saw men riding bikes hauling carts that were laden with supplies, lumber, broken cars, or baskets of vegetables and things for the market.  Fathers passed me pulling a carriage containing a young, sleepy child.  Long before I saw these bike carriages in the United States, they were in wide use in China.  Sometimes I saw women dressed for work riding side saddle on the back fender of another’s bike.  Old and young, they all rode bicycles. The two outer lanes of the four-lane avenue were completely filled with people on bikes who obeyed traffic lights just as cars.  The middle two lanes were reserved for cars and busses, but there were very few motor vehicles compared to bikes.  

 

 It was about a mile to the Beijing Hotel, the tallest building in Beijing, and as my pack was very heavy, I was glad when I saw it looming ahead.  Upon arriving, I made my way up the main steps and into the elegant white marble lobby with a thick red Chinese rug on the floor. This was where Richard Nixon stayed when he visited China in 1972.   I found the money exchange counter right away.  The girls there were in no hurry to wait on me.  They finished their conversation before they even acknowledged me.  

I later learned that there were two kinds of currency: Chinese yuan, for foreigners, and renminbi, the people’s money, for Chinese citizens. Once I had Chinese yuan, I found the hotel’s coffee shop, where a waitress took my order in English and I gladly ordered coffee.  I was very hungry but the menu prices were somewhat steep, so I thought I would wait to eat in my hotel dining room. I sat in a comfortable easy chair amongst a handful of other Caucasians, listening to piped-in classical music, and eaves-dropped on their conversations. I was weary from my walk and from my long train ride. It was all divine: a little piece of luxury in this grey and drab world.  

Back out on the street I walked south for several miles down another main avenue to the hotel Matias had suggested.  If there were taxis in Beijing, it was not obvious to me. There was no subway system. Buses were available, but I could not imagine how to figure out which one to take.  I thought of hiring a rickshaw but that felt embarrassing and I did not want to draw any more attention to myself.  Just walking around drew plenty of attention. So I walked for over an hour. I certainly stood out in my Burkenstock sandals, my baggy gray pants from Korea, and my suntan and light brown hair from several months of living in Thailand. It was late in the day and people were on their way home from work. As the sun started to set, the air became damper. I saw no signs of restaurants or simple eateries anywhere. I wondered where people went to eat and if there even were restaurants in Beijing. People sat outside on their stoops or on the sidewalk in front of their apartments cooking meals on little coal cook stoves. The air was filled with the smell of burning coal.  I walked through neighborhoods of brick apartment complexes.  One man had set up his bicycle repair shop on the sidewalk: old bikes, tubing and bike parts were just piled along the sidewalk while he repaired bicycles or pumped up tires for people.  Elderly grandparents carted babies and toddlers in wooden carriages, more like tall, bamboo wagons than baby carriages.   The streets were dusty and brown with dirt.  I could not tell an apartment complex from a business, from a school, from a restaurant because everything looked the same: either dull gray cement or dark red brick.  There were no signs or advertisements, colorful displays or lights.  There may have been small signs in Chinese but the entire city was devoid of any sort of advertisement.   I was walking through neighborhoods where people conducted their life more on the street than in the home.  On the sidewalks, children played, older people cooked, men gathered squatting in a circle on the ground to play cards.   Very young children did not wear diapers, but either went pantless or had a large slit instead of a pants crotch.  Hundreds of bikes continuously poured past me, bicycle bells ringing. People stared and stared and I just kept walking, sweating, exhausted, and very hungry.  I was grateful when I finally reached the hotel, where I put down my pack, checked in, showered away the grime, and ate a wonderful and satisfying hot meal in the hotel dining room.  

 

I had a few things to take care of in Beijing to prepare for my 6 day train ride across Russia, one of which was to get my Mongolian visa, which took a considerable amount of time, but I was also determined to see as much of the city as I could in the short week I had there.  I walked everywhere, but having a bicycle would have been handy.  Everyday I made my way through residential neighborhoods and eventually, got to know my way around the central part of the city. 

 

One afternoon I found myself back on Chang’an Jie, the main boulevard in front of the Beijing Hotel and I decided to stay on it and head west to an intriguing block of emptiness on my map called Tiananmen Square, directly across from the Forbidden City, the palace and home of former emperors and now a museum.  When I reached the massive square I stopped in amazement and stood looking around for some time.  Chang’an Jie continued on but to the left of where I stood was the large expanse, over 100 acres, of Tiananmen Square. Bordering the square were massive government buildings: the Great Hall of the People, city hall, Parliament, and a history museum, each guarded by military. Everything was so militant-looking in Beijing, I had a hard time knowing which buildings were open to the public and which were not, which were museums and which were government buildings and there were no signs in English. Facing south, towards the far end of the square I could make out the Monument to the People’s Heroes, beyond which was Mao’s mausoleum. Turning north, on the other side of the avenue was the enormous Tiananmen, or Gate of Heavenly Peace, an immense wall marking the entrance to the Forbidden City. Above the central entryway within the wall hung the well-known portrait of Mao ZeDong.  It was eerie and surreal to see his huge face looking out at the activity of the street below him and the square in front of him.  Behind his portrait was the remnant of China’s legacy of imperial reign.  On either side of his portrait were two placards in Chinese.  One said, “Long live the People’s Republic of China” and the other, “Long live the Great Unity of the World’s Peoples.” Just beyond the wall, beckoned the roof top of an intriguing building from another century that was part of the Imperial palace grounds.   

 

I was fascinated with Tiananmen Square.  It was clearly a social gathering place for the people of Beijing. People strolled while chatting idly, children played, men squatted in circles, smoking and sharing stories or playing some sort of game with dice.  It felt like a very relaxed atmosphere. There were no trees or benches.  It was just a huge expanse, acres and acres of open brick.  I wondered about the history that took place here. It was very palpable to me that masses of people had gathered here in the past, that very charged events had taken place here. This was before I knew anything about China. I hadn’t yet known about the May 4th Movement of 1919, a mass demonstration of over 3,000 university students in Beijing who had gathered in the square to protest the decision of the Versailles Peace Conference for China after WWI.  I didn’t know that on October 1, 1949 Chairman Mao proclaimed the founding of the People’s Republic of China to a throng of people in Tiananmen Square. Nor did I know that there had been protests here in April of 1976 following the death of Premier Zhou Enlai where over 2 million people came to commemorate Zhou’s memory and to revolt against Chairman Mao and his policies. But I felt it. I knew that gatherings of enormous significance took place here and I stood there and soaked it in. I couldn’t possibly know of the political rumblings that were happening in the background of Beijing at that time, where in 2 years, student protesters would once again gather and the government would crack down on them. I spent the rest of that afternoon wandering all around Tiananmen Square quite taken by the enormity of it and the cold bareness of it, staying until it became too chilly, I was terribly hungry, and the sun had begun to set.

 

The next day I rose early and spent the entire day walking through the Forbidden City.  Built in the 15th century, for roughly 500 years this was the palace home of emperors from the mid-Ming until the end of the Qing Dynasty in 1911 with the last emperor. I obtained my ticket easily, for there was no line at all. Passing through the main entry gate and walking under Mao’s portrait, I came out to an expanse of brick.  As far as I could see in the distance were rectangular-shaped Chinese buildings, all with the traditional tiled roof that curved out to points at each corner.  I gasped at the enormity of the site and could not take it all in.  The site was 180 acres in size and contained more than 980 buildings. Before me was a very wide, white marble staircase, separated by an elaborate and ornate marble dragon, a symbol of the emperor, carved into the center of the staircase.  There were other tourists here; some were foreigners and some were Chinese school groups and Chinese visitors from out of town, but it was not very crowded and I felt I had most of the grounds to myself.  I rarely encountered another person except from afar.  I crossed over an ornate bridge, which led to yet another gate which in turn led to the Hall of Supreme Harmony, the emperor’s throne.  Each building was exquisite; the woodwork was painted in minute detail in blues and reds and golds.  I could spend an hour just gazing at the artistic details of one building, and there were so many buildings to see. Throughout the complex were white marble dragons, elaborate marble fences, bridges, and large open expanses.  I walked through it all day, avoiding the rain, dodging in and out of the rooms, imagining this place when it was the emperor’s home and bustling with workers and activity.  The emperor was literally shut out from the city by a large wall that surrounded the entire complex with front and back gates on either end. He was completely walled in and never left the complex.   It was so large I could not take it all in and yet I absorbed everything I could. I was completely transported back to another time.  It felt very safe and peaceful there, beautiful, refined.  I completely forgot who I was, that I was in communist Beijing, that it was 1987 and I was an American woman.  I was transported back to another time in China that left me completely mesmerized. The architecture, the art and beauty soothed me and comforted me and I lost all track of time and identity.  

 

Seven hours later, I came out at the other end exhausted and hungry, and found myself in a small, dingy neighborhood once again.  Housing units surrounded walled-in courtyards and every now and then one could look through a portal inside to the courtyard to see children playing with elderly grandparents who ran after them or women washing clothes in large wash basins. “Hutongs” I later learned these were called, the alleyways made of courtyard residences that were all joined together.  Most of these old “hutong” neighborhoods were eventually destroyed with the modernization of China as new apartment buildings took their place in the 1990s and 2000s. It took me a long time to walk back to the main road and then all the way back to my hotel where I could, I knew, find very good food in the hotel restaurant.  That night in the restaurant I was weary and very hungry and mistakenly ordered soup before my meal.  Expecting a small cup, I was surprised when a tureen large enough for six people arrived.  Embarrassed, I ate a cupful and had to leave the rest.  

 

            Beijing felt utilitarian to me.  There was no joy or color or anything that would even remotely be called festive that I could see. Sometimes I saw large billboards at major intersections.  These were paintings that depicted a very bright and happy, young Chinese man or woman, or couple, or family, typically farmers and laborers, looking cheerful, healthy, hopeful and proud. Usually they faced the sun or looked to the horizon, and were dressed in traditional worker clothes, the sleeves of the man rolled up, holding a tool such as a hammer in one hand, with a slogan written beside him in Chinese.  I longed to know what the slogan said, but had no idea.  I knew the faces on the billboards did not reflect the reality of the life of the serious and somber faces of the city’s not quite as robust inhabitants I saw who were rushing about going here and there.  The billboards were creepy to me. The city was drab and dreary, dirty and dusty, crowded and gray.  I was looking forward to Saturday, when I would be safely on the train and leaving the city.  The entire time I was out in the Beijing city streets I felt ill at ease.  

 

On my last day in the city, I went to Tian Tan, the Temple of Heaven, which was near my hotel. It had an intriguing name and I had no idea what it referred to. It was a cloudy day and I arrived early in the morning and paid a fee at the west entrance gate. There was just one man in a booth who collected the fare and handed out tickets. Here too, there was no line at all as it didn’t appear that Beijing people went to these sites and tourists were few. I was given a key chain with a photo of the Temple of Heaven as a memento. I proceeded to walk through the extensive 660-acre park towards the temple grounds that were located in the center of the park. The park was comprised of trees, and gardens, pavilions.  Many local people utilized the park, but as with the Forbidden City, it was so expansive, it never felt crowded to me. I loved it there.  I had a sense of what the old, beautiful China must have looked like.  When it started to sprinkle and I made my way across a grassy patch to get to some shelter, I found myself dodging a number of elderly people who had gathered to do their morning Tai Chi routine.  I stood under a roof awning and watched them for some time, in their Mao suits, moving so gracefully, their faces peaceful and content.  

The Temple of Heaven, like the Forbidden City, was impressive.  It was built in the early 15th century by the same architect and had a similar architecture. The temple, located in the center of the park, was set within gardens and surrounded by woods.  It symbolizes the relationship between earth and heaven, the human and the divine. It was visited by the emperors of the Ming and Qing dynasties, the last two imperial dynasties of China, for annual ceremonies of prayer to heaven for a good harvest. The emperor was regarded as the Son of Heaven, and administered earthly matters on behalf of and representing, heaven authority. Twice a year, he would leave the Forbidden City and wearing special robes and after a period of fasting, would be moved to the Temple of Heaven for ceremonial purposes.  No common person was allowed to look at him. The temple grounds cover 1 square mile of parkland with three Main groups of constructions.  From the south is the Circular Mound Altar, an empty circular platform on 3 levels of marble stone. At the center is a round slate, the Heart of Heaven, where the emperor prayed for favorable weather.  Moving north of that is the Imperial Vault of Heaven, a single-gabled, circular building built on a single layer of marble stone. North of this is the Hall of Prayer for Good Harvest, the main attraction,  a triple-layered circular building on a three-layered marble base. It was flanked by two rectangular religious buildings. 

I had also learned that that twice the temple complex had been occupied for as long as a year. Once it was occupied by the Anglo-French Alliance during the 2nd Opium War in 1856 and another time it was occupied by the 8-Nation Alliance during the Boxer Rebellion in 1899. It was painful to learn that these foreign occupations desecrated the temple and caused serious damage to the building complex and gardens. After the end of the Qing Dynasty in 1911, the temple was neglected until 1918, when it was turned into a park and opened to the public. 

As with the Forbidden City, once again I was completely absorbed in the architecture of this structure and the symbolic significance of its purpose. The detailed painting on the ceiling and the large pillars was mesmerizing.  I lost track of time, swept up by its beauty, significance, and history.  

It was here, on my last day, that I truly felt connected to God in China.  The purpose of Tian Tan was to serve as a holy temple.  The emperor had to perform the ceremonial rituals flawlessly or it could mean a year of bad luck, bad harvest, and potentially starvation for all the people.  There was dignity and grace in the majestic forms of the buildings.  There was intention in each architectural choice. At the northern end, the round temples represented heaven.  The shorter, rectangular buildings in the south represented earth. The dark blue roof tiles also represented heaven. I could feel the sincere intention of the observant emperor: the lives of the people depended on his actions.  Communism attempted to wipe out all traces of God from its culture.  But I felt God here in the temple, in the beauty of the art, as well as in the faces of the children I watched playing in the park, and in the poise and grace of the elderly people performing Tai Chi with absolute precision and fluidity. I stayed here for most of the morning.

Back on the streets of Beijing many hours later, the harshness and bleakness of the city made me feel ill at ease once more.  Although I had been completely swept up by the culture, history, and beauty of ancient China, there was no doubt about it: modern Communist China frightened me. 

Early the next morning I sat in the train station in a special waiting room designated for travelers on the Trans-Siberian Railroad and was relieved when we boarded.

Within twenty minutes of departing I could see the Great Wall in the distance. It extended for miles inching its way up and down mountains.  It was very satisfying to see even from a train window.  I sat back in my seat and sighed with a sense of accomplishment.  I had entered a country that frightened me, I successfully made it through my week, I had seen some important sights, and now I was leaving unharmed.  A six-day train journey and new adventures awaited me.  I was ready to leave China behind me and had no need to ever return.  

 

But I did return. Five years later I made my second trip to China, this time under very different circumstances, for now I had some basic language skills, a better understanding of the culture, and had several good Chinese friends who lived in Beijing.   I would be studying tuina in Beijing, a form of Chinese massage. I was eager and excited to be going for Beijing was no longer a scary place, but a friendly familiar place with friends and I would have a purpose in going. 

However, there was more to this trip than a chance to study and visit, for as the years unfolded, and I eventually moved to Boston, I would meet a young man from China who ultimately, broke my heart. I knew I had to return to China to mend it.