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The best Beijing escapes
Go beyond the city walls and explore China’s varied landscapes
 Zubin Li / iStockphoto.com See the silk scrolls, water buffalo, rice paddies, fishing cormorants and peasants in straw hats at the Li River Valley and Guilin. Tours take travelers to Yangshuo, the ancient town that has kept its original character but has also now become hotel central. A little far from Beijing, flights take just over three hours, but the experience is a completely Chinese one. |
Every student of Chinese will eventually be taught that China’s immense and varied landscape shaped the nation’s culture, traditions and language. From the deserts and mountains of the west, to the flatter coastal regions in the east; the icy swaths in the north that reach toward Siberia and the tropical regions in the south—the world’s fourth-largest country has it all. Geographical conditions would often decide how a region would feed itself, and what culturally and politically emerged from that most basic of needs.
For instance, in the unforgiving Loess Plateau of the northern plains of the country, cave dwellings were necessary because driving winds made building difficult. Apart from further south, near the Yellow River, larger communities were impossible to sustain; people lived in scattered groups, so a disparate cultural landscape evolved. And since agriculture was difficult to develop, trade became important. Thus was born the Silk Road, and with it one of the most famous and long-lasting interaction with central Asia and eventually Europe. It was also a means by which Buddhism entered the country, and astonishing examples of what was left in its wake can be found at Dunhuang, Longmen and, much nearer Beijing, Datong.
Nearby the Silk Road are the flat prairies of Inner Mongolia, with its tales of Genghis Khan and his marauding troops (who also used the Silk Road to plunder the cities they could). We owe Mongolian hotpot to the great warrior, who in his haste to conquer came up with the idea of boiling stew in his troops’ helmets rather than waste time cooking.
In a bid to keep out these "barbarians" the Great Wall of China was built. In Chinese there is a saying that a man isn’t a true Han Chinese unless he has touched it. That's not so hard to do—there are bits of it everywhere, and the eastern end, where it plunges into the sea, is just a three-hour train ride from Beijing. But for a couple of days in the mountains, stay in the heart of a Chinese village around Mutianyu.
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Then there's the lush southeast tropics of Shanghai, with its nearby ancient water towns on the more affluent eastern coast. It was in Shanghai and Hong Kong where Western influence was felt most bitterly after the loss of Hong Kong to Britain following the Opium Wars. Near Shanghai, the country’s longest river, the Yangtze, provided food but was always a natural boundary and cultural divide between north and south. Even today, many towns south of the river do not have central heating, where those to the north all do. The river is still a major means of trade and transport. It was also one of the few means by which the central parts of Sichuan could be connected to other areas, being in such mountainous and isolated terrain. Further west from there, you reach the virtually uninhabited plateaus and wilds of Qinghai and Tibet—China’s harshest, if most spectacular, regions.
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Michael Hoefner / iStockphoto.com Yet another of China’s UNESCO World Heritage Sites, the Terracotta Warriors at Xi’an are just an hour’s flight from Beijing. Xi’an also has an ancient city wall and an interesting Muslim quarter, and plenty of high-end hotels. |
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