Temple Attacks Tourists
This is actually the Temple for Bountiful Harvests - part of the massive and so beautiful Temple of Heaven park in Beijing.
Arranged on a north - south axis there was a series of temples and buildings through which the Emperor would, once annually, go to the Temple and take on the sins of his people.
Through sacrifice, penance and ritual (all done, it should be noted, to animals, acolytes and monks respectively) the Emperor would thus wash away the sins of the world. Sound familiar?
I did offer up big asanyas for my farming friends and relatives but mostly I was disturbed by the sometimes clumsy, sometimes very, very subtle but nonetheless massive restoration that had taken place at the Park.
Then Chris found the one and only photograph of the temples taken in 1971, when work to restore damage done during the Cultural Revolution was begun. And I began to muse on how many of the people now milling around as tourists would have been Red Guards 40 years old.
Imagining Mao, the great soldier - perhaps with a soldier's distrust and disgust of things creative, cultural and artistic - ordering all 'old things' to be purged. Temples, instruments, paintings, scrolls, jewellery, pottery, poetry and pots - anything at all 'old' destroyed or defaced. And the kids racing out to do it.
Even the birds, which we only spotted in the temples (as the monks are vegetarian ha ha) were driven from the sky by people banging pots or making noise so that they could not alight (and then eat the crops, you see).
Ah, it's a beautiful and sad place.
