Dylan Schiemann

On Monday, April 6th, our local QCon Beijing hosts gave us a tour of Beijing. We began early with a trip to Tiananmen Square, which can hold approximately 1 million people, dwarfing any of the squares or piazzas that I’ve ever seen, and is an amazingly powerful and symbolic place and includes Mao’s Tomb and more:

And here I am with Mao:

Tiananmen Square directly faces the Forbidden City. Deceptive in size at first glance, it is a massive collection of palaces and gardens that could take an entire day to view in precise detail, and would certainly have intimidated any foreign leaders that might have visited China over the years. By comparison, it dwarfs the palaces in Seoul and most anywhere really. My favorite part of the palaces was not the massive architecture of the buildings up front, but the gardens near the rear of the forbidden city.

This stone is extremely large… in order to get it to the palace in one piece, they created an artificial frozen river hundreds of years ago and slid the stone on the ice from many many miles away from the Forbidden City:

The engineering effort required to build the Fobidden City and the Great Wall is astonishing. Until I visited, it was difficult for me to understand why any of the locals appreciate or respect the current government, and seeing these buildings made things a lot clearer for me: the current government is a lot less repressive than previous regimes. I had a general uneasy feeling that if I did even one thing wrong, I’d end up in jail from a government that basically controls everything, and that single party is in charge of creation and enforcement of all laws. Beijing is the only city I know of that x-rays all luggage before entering any major sites, or the subway.

On the lighter side of things, for lunch we had a very classic Beijing lunch, with very authentic cuisine:

The people in China have just started learning to drive. People walk and drive in a way that’s consistent with everything about the Chinese population: they are aggressive and driven/hungry. Whether it’s how they walk, push their way onto the subway before passengers get off the train, order food, speak, and more, the population is much more direct and aggressive than Korea and Japan by comparison. I would argue that their assertiveness would surprise even the most aggressive New Yorkers.

After a late lunch, we toured the Birdcage and the Water Cube at the Olympic Village. I did not watch the 2008 Olympics, so seeing these two buildings surprised me a bit as astonishing examples of modern architecture. The cost to visit these two buildings was much more expensive than visiting the Forbidden City, and it is heavily skewed by attempts to recoup the costs of building these structures.

They are simply very impressive architectural feats, and photos cannot come close to capturing how impressive they are. I did make a short video of the inside of the Water Cube:

We had a large dinner for all of the speakers and editors at the Ho Hai Hutong for Sechuan food which was wonderfully great. I had real Kung Pao chicken for the first time, and had just an amazing all around feast.