London can show you the world in an afternoon

Intrigued by a fellow blogger's recent account - over at City Views, Country Dreams - of the Weiwei Zodiac Heads in New York, I was inspired to go along and see the same exhibition in London last week.

As in New York, where the imposing Plaza hotel and its fountains were the backdrop, the setting here was equally spectacular - Somerset House on the Victoria Embankment ...

Our iffy June weather was evident  - umbrellas were up (you can see some rain drops on my lens!), but there were little bursts of sunshine in between the drizzle ...

The heads have been placed in a semi-circle around the fountains in the courtyard (which in winter becomes an ice-skating rink).

Chinese artist Ai Weiwei, as Frances at City Views mentioned, was detained in China shortly after launching the tour of his animal head sculptures to New York and London. Before this, he had made news in London for a remarkable exhibition at the Tate Modern of 100 million individually-created porcelain sunflower seeds! He remains imprisoned, for reasons to do with political dissent.

Some people didn't mind getting wet at all ...!

The Zodiac heads represent the twelve Chinese astrological signs and are a recreation of the heads that once decorated an 18th century fountain clock at Beijing's summer palace. The originals were looted when the palace garden was destroyed by the British and French.

Some looked fierce and imposing ...

others cute and even cartoon-like ...

I had another reason for coming here, though. The Courtauld Gallery at Somerset House opened an exhibition this week of Toulouse Lautrec's portraits of Jane Avril: Beyond the Moulin Rouge.

The Courtauld is one of my favourite galleries in London (though I might have said that about the Saatchi?). Small and cosy, it has a fabulous little collection of impressionists and post-impressionists in a setting, in a wing of Somerset House, as beautiful as the paintings ...

Toulouse Lautrec helped make Jane Avril famous through his posters of her dancing at the Moulin Rouge ...

But the exhibition aims to go beyond that by exploring their private relationship off-stage. Nicknamed 'La Mélinite' (a form of explosive), she came from a harsh background of poverty and abuse, and suffered from a neurological disorder - St Vitus Dance or chorea.

portrait of Jane Avril

'La Goulue' (the Glutton), dancer Louise Weber, Avril's rival

Mlle Marcelle Lender    

I think I liked the lithographs best of all  ... I love the life and movement in these drawings ...

Walking back along the Embankment after leaving the exhibition I had a choice of the Victoria gardens on one side, where a ping-pong table had been set up, below. My mind still half on China, it reminded me of Boris Johnson's oafishly funny speech at the Beijing Olympics hand-over ceremony about 'ping-pong coming home' (watch here) ...

... or the Thames on the other ...

I liked this view of the London Eye apparently on the back of a smiling Sphinx (and a tiny aeroplane serendipitously overhead)

Behind the sphinx I could also spy Big Ben and the Houses of Parliament further down the river ...

Two faux (Victorian) sphinxes flank the Egyptian obelisk, below (an original, dating from 1450 BC).  It is one of a pair - the other is in New York's Central Park. An interesting coincidence I thought, given the twin exhibitions of Weiwei's sculptures in these two cities, the history of China's original Zodiac heads, and Weiwei's intention "to toy with ideas of real and fake, looting and national symbolism".

While pondering all this I snapped a more conventional view of the London Eye 

... and, taken just before I hopped on the tube, this view from under the Jubilee Bridge of St Paul's against a grey blue sky.

Quelle mélange this post has turned out to be - it seems a couple of hours meander along the Embankment can make the world connect in strange ways!

Forbidden City, Beijing

Today is census day for Britain (coming around every ten years since 1801, except for once during WWII), and also the day we put the clocks forward to daylight savings. I can't bring myself to say 'summer time', since despite the rash optimism of my previous post, it's a grey, nippy 8º C outside. 

A day, then, for another in my series of random travel posts, this one from a trip to China two years ago ...

While Shanghai (see here) gave glimpses into the personal, private details of life in China, Beijing, from the moment we landed at the spectacularly shiny, spanking-clean, post-Olympic City airport, was all drama, power, history. And nowhere were these elements more concentrated than in the Forbidden City.

For around 500 years the Forbidden City was the seat of power and intrigue, access to it denied on punishment of death to all but a select few people. It was home to China's Emperors, their families, servants, guards, senior civil servants, as well as, famously, the emperor’s concubines – well-educated young women chosen from the ‘best’ Manchu families to spend the rest of their lives cloistered in the Forbidden City – and the eunuchs who guarded them. 

(Both these last have their own stories, such as the last Chinese eunuch, who died in 1996 (see here) or the young concubine who rose in the ranks to become a powerful Empress Dowager - see here).

I'm the sort of person who is invariably drawn to details, but the aerial photo below gives a sense of the scale of the City and why exploring it properly would take weeks. Also called "the Great Within", it lies right in the heart of Beijing, which is arranged in a series of concentric circles around it, on a south-north axis from Tianenmen Square, in the foreground below... 

Photo credit for above shot: http://www.freebase.com/view/m/04g6kp_

... and is laid out in perfect symmetry – a series of intricate palaces linked by huge squares, courtyards and man-made lakes.

Their names speak of their designers' intentions - you pass through the  Halls or Gates of  Supreme Harmony, Heavenly Purity, or Earthly Tranquility, now guarded (it's a UNESCO world heritage site) by men and women in traditional dress...

Inside, every architectural feature, colour and decoration has symbolic significance ...

Beauty in the details of doors, ceilings and cornices, above and carved stone floors, below.

On this day in October, the great majority of the crowds thronging through the City seemed to be Chinese rather than foreign visitors ...

People crowding to touch a giant urn for good luck (above) and a little girl gets a better view riding on her father's shoulders (below)

All the buildings are made of wood. Huge bronze urns, like the one below left, were kept filled with water to deal with the fire hazard.

And below, the modern face of China's might was in evidence through the policemen who stood to attention or marched around all over the Forbidden City. I'm not sure what their purpose was there, other than simply a reminder of their presence, but in that they were certainly effective. (I was a little nervous taking this hurried photo. Is the guy in the centre of the front row giving me the beady eye?).

In Beijing restaurants, in the vast, sky-scrapered modern city, we were introduced to some of the best food we'd ever eaten in our lives, with vegetarian daughters deciding they'd landed in food heaven ...

Finally, it would be unforgivable to visit Beijing without a day-trip to the Great Wall of China ...

... though sadly, for me it was impossible to do justice to this sight in pictures. The photo below, of only a tiny section of the wall, may give some sense of how literally awesome it felt to be there.

Shanghai Dreams

Another random travel post to distract from humdrum grey days ...

As someone with European and African roots, travelling in China a couple of years ago was a fascinating and quite literally mind-expanding experience, but of the cities we visited, Shanghai was the one that completely captured my heart as well.

Old meets new: skyscrapers loom behind a roof in the Old City, Shanghai.

Despite the warmth and friendliness of every individual we encountered, Chinese culture seemed sometimes impenetrable, as though behind closed doors existed the world I wanted to understand but couldn’t hope to in a fleeting time...

In Shanghai I caught some glimpses behind those doors. Amazing that in a city of 19 million people it was possible to see everywhere the expressions of personal lives.

People burning incense at the Jade Buddha Temple (top) and City God Temple (below). In Chinese Taoist and Buddhist temples, worshippers light and burn sticks of incense which they raise above the head while bowing to  statues of a deity or an ancestor, then place them in a censer in front of the statue. 

One of the 70 + resident monks at the Jade Buddha Temple.

 

The Reclining Buddha, carved in whole white jade, represents Buddha’s death; his pose is called the ‘lucky repose’ and his face shows his peaceful mood as he left this world. I found this an interesting contrast with Christianity's suffering Christ in death. 

 Parks in Shanghai, like temples, are places of peace and sanctuary in this massively populous city.

Yu Gardens in the Old City. In the centre of a lake here is a pavilion housing the Huxinting Tea House where we experienced the elaborate and contemplative ritual of a Chinese tea ceremony, below.

In Fuxing Park, in the French Concession, designed (unlike Yu Gardens above) in the French style with lakes, fountains, pavilions and flowerbeds, people practice t'ai chi, as these two ladies below ...

or chat and play cards ...

... and walking around this park you hear the sounds of music everywhere, as people come here to practice ballroom dancing, operatic singing, or to meet their teachers for lessons on an instrument.

 

 Man having a lesson on the mouth organ from his teacher on the right

Street scenes in Shanghai seem to reflect unique blends of traditional and modern ways of life ...

Fruit seller (above) and scrap merchant (below) near Zhongshan Road

Women cycling along one of the wide, tree-lined roads of the former French Concession

 Petite, pretty girls chat outside a curio shop in West Shanghai

 Street food vendor with members of his family

What are Shanghai motorcycle boy's dreams?

Check out the trailer here for 'Shanghai Dreams',  Xiaoshuai Wang's (2005) film about a family relocated in the 1960s to a small industrial town, while the father dreams of Shanghai as the future for his children. 

The Bund (below)  - the famous stretch of historical buildings lining the Huangpu River - has seen some turbulent history. Its architecture reflects the period of the late 19th and early 20th centuries when Shanghai was controlled by foreign powers. These were the  banking headquarters and consulates for Britain, France, Italy, the Netherlands, Belgium, Germany, Russia, Japan and the USA.

In 1937, after Japan’s invasion of China, hundreds of Chinese prisoners of war were marched down to the Bund and slaughtered on the river bank.

The Bund at night. Its name comes from a Hindi word meaning ‘embankment’.  A little upstream from where I took this picture is the place called ‘Three Waters Mingle Together’ – where the Huangpu river,  the East China Sea and  the Yangtze river meet.

The picture above seems to symbolise the next phase of China's history. One of the most interesting things we did in Shanghai was to visit the museum of the Chinese Communist Party, in the former French Concession, where you can see documented (in English) Mao’s early struggle to rid China of foreign imperialism.

  

The museum includes this waxwork recreation of the first meeting, held in secret on this site on July 23, 1921, of the first national congress of the Communist Party of China, marking the birth of the Party. A young Mao Zedong, standing, leads the meeting.

Bo Caldwell's wonderful book Distant Land of My Father captures all of this history in her story of her father's journey from expedient and shady  foreign entrepreneur in Shanghai of the 1930s to torture by the Japanese and imprisonment under Chinese communist rule. Her opening lines might inspire you to read on:

“Shanghai, June 1937, the air hot and muggy. My father stood on the verandah of our home, a villa on Hungjao Road in the western suburbs outside of the International Settlement. His back was to me as he looked out at the expanse of lawn that to me, at six, seemed vast as an ocean. He faced east, towards the Bund and the Whangpoo River, and I thought I smelled the river’s familiar sharpness, a grimy mix of factory smoke and seaweed and fish, though the Whangpoo was some ten miles away.” 

Faces of China, old and young ...