My China : When Beijing was PekingPrepared by Harold Stephens
Travel Correspondent for Thai Airways International
“You lived in China, before it was Red China! What was it like?”
Whenever someone I’ve just met asks if I’ve been to China, and I tell him or her that I have, they seem to perk up. It’s then that they ask the question, “What was it like?”
With Beijing in the midst of the Olympics I think of that question every time I read a newspaper or turn on a TV. What was China like before? I read and hear all the concern about pollution and traffic and the tearing down of old Beijing to make room for a new one. When I hear and read these comments I find it an easy question to answer. The China we see today isn’t even remotely like the one I knew. Old China and China today are worlds apart. Is that bad or good? Let me first tell readers about the China I knew right after the war, before the Peoples’ Republic came into power.
Although it was a long time ago, immediately after World War II, I remember it all clearly as if it just happened. Maybe it’s because China was far more different than anyone today could ever imagine.
I was a 17-year-o1d Marine private, fresh from the Battle of Okinawa and, when the war ended, instead of being sent home my regiment was sent to China to repatriate the Japanese forces. For a battle-weary regiment, it was not what everyone wanted to hear.
I guess I was the one exception. I grumbled and complained with the rest, but beneath it all I was enthralled at the idea. It was a new adventure. We were going to China. China! Our port of call was Tsingtao.
When the sea turned yellow and then mud colored, we were near. Early the next morning I saw land, a faint silhouette, almost like a darkened cloud. A voice came over the PA system telling us it was the southeast coast of the Shantung Peninsula.
China came as a shock, for two reasons. En route our convoy had weathered one of the worst typhoons in 40 years, which left the China Sea littered with wrecked junks. We spent days looking for survivors among the debris, but found only bloated bodies still tied to splintered masts and rigging. It was like floating through a sea of death.
Then, there was the land itself. It was dismal, mountainous and barren. No life. Not even a tree. And no color. Grey and hard. Even when dawn turned into day it was bleak. As we sailed along the coast, we studied the shoreline: a sheltered cove with junks at anchor (those fortunate ones which survived,) and a fishing village nestled in a valley.
There was something else. It looked so strange at first. Near the village was a long and narrow line, as if someone had taken a draftsman’s ruler and had drawn a pencil mark from the edge of the sea to a diminishing point in the far mountains. We sailed closer.
It was nothing more than a wall, a wall without apparent purpose. But still it was there, a Chinese wall. For the next three years I would be surrounded by walls, and it was from behind a Chinese wall that I would escape to freedom after the country had fallen to the Communist forces.
We arrived in Tsingtao, a seaport on the coast. No sooner was anchor dropped than bumboats, small sampans sculled by single oars, besieged us. The Chinese came waving and shouting, displaying their wares: silk robes, souvenirs, whiskey—bottles of whiskey.
Before leaving Guam I had found a book on Spoken Chinese, and on board ship I mastered a number of Chinese expressions and phrases. It was my downfall. I had joked with the other marines, when they heard me spouting out Chinese, that I came from a missionary family. They didn’t know I was a farm boy from Pennsylvania. When our commanding officer heard that someone aboard spoke Chinese, I was summoned to the staff quarters. A landing party was going ashore in the morning to negotiate for quarters for the regiment. Since no officer aboard spoke Chinese, I would go as interpreter.
“But my Chinese is not good,” I protested.
“It will come back. A little practice. Report on deck in shore uniform at 0800.”
I studied my handbook, even missing my evening meal, until lights went out, and then I sat in the toilet and studied more until I was run out. “You some nut or sumptun,” the M.P. said. But I was progressing. “Are you married? Do you have your own rice bowl?” The next morning there were but a half dozen vehicles in our small convoy but the whole city it seemed turned out. I had never seen so many people except in news shorts of ticker-tape parades in New York City. The Chinese lined the streets in solid masses. Some climbed poles and others peered down from windows and rooftops. We were their liberating heroes. No one then gave thought to how long the welcome would last.
Those first impressions are lasting. Masses of smiling, waving humanity dressed in dark somber colors. There was not one Western dress among them. The men, with short clipped hair or else shaven heads, wore long robes over trousers. Women wore long dresses with their hair cut in bangs. All of the older women had bound feet, squeezed into pointed, black-silk shoes. Nearly everyone, from old folks to infant, waved small American flags.
We drove through the city to the Shantung University, where a reception of elderly Chinese gentlemen awaited us. The commanding officer and his staff stepped out to shake hands. I breathed a sigh of relief when I heard the Chinese speak in flawless English. My day was saved.
What started as a lark turned out to be my boon. I was in Tsingtao only a few months when I learned I was being sent to Peking to study Chinese at the university. That’s when Beijing was called Peking. I flew, on my first flight ever, to Tiensin and there took a train to Peking.
The train was one of those ancient conveyances that must have served the Marines before me during the Boxer Rebellion: The coal-burning engine huffed and puffed and sent out belches of steam and messy black soot. It left Tiensin and reached out for the outer edges of the great Gobi Desert.
The express, which really wasn't an express, carried both freight and passengers. Armed marine and Chinese guards stood watch in all the compartments.
The land was arid and dust-swept. Everything was brown and colorless. Farms were flat with the houses low and surrounded by mud walls and much of the landscape was dominated by burial mounds of hard earth. They seemed to be endless.
After the second day monotony set in, and, being young and impatient, I was bored. I found it much more interesting to climb up the ladder between the coaches and sit on the roof with my legs hanging down. Since we moved slowly, there was not too much wind.
For hours every day sitting on the roof, I studied the unattainable horizon. The tracks before us unrolled like a black ribbon upon an endless waste, and behind us we left a finger of smoke that lingered motionless in the laquered sky. And I became dust-covered - my eyelashes, my hair, my clothing. Then I saw it.
First I saw the dust, a sky of dust, and then the outer walls. It was Peking. The great city loomed up like a picture in a child's storybook. Peking, the mighty and ancient capital of Cathay. It seemed like hours to close that last distance.
I could see ahead that the track led through an opening in a huge, massive wall that surrounded the city. I immediately dropped down between the coaches, but the conductor had locked the door. I came out of the tunnel coughing and covered with black soot.
But I soon forgot my discomfort. A new and fascinating world flashed before me, strange and unbelievable. Everything caught my attention. I wanted to stop the train then and there, as though once we passed it might all have gone forever. But even as we moved ahead I could catch even the sounds and smells. Rickshaw drivers shouted warnings as they trotted along, vendors clicked wooden blocks to gain attention, wood-burning steam powered lorries tooted their horns and there was the eternal clamour of an excited city.
Unexpected was the sudden opulence seen everywhere. Shops were bulging with wares; foodstuffs hung in the streets, meats and delicacies were displayed in glassless windows. Restaurants flew lively banners. Peddlers pushed heavy carts laden with farm produce.
And there was the dress: men in long back robes, women in high-necked silk gowns, and some with bound feet, moving in short choppy steps. School children in national uniforms carried their books in bags hung over their shoulders.
I remember that moment so well, my arrival by train to Peking. Now when I hear someone say they are going to China, I know it cannot be the same. I have read with great sadness that much of what I had seen after the war has changed. But more about that next week.
QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS
Q. Dear Mr. Stephens, You will be writing about Beijing next week. You also call it Peking. I realize the name was changed after 1949. Old Peking is now Beijing. But why stop there? There is Peking Man. Why not Beijing Man. Or Beijing duck? Thank you. Looking forward to you story on Beijing. Walter Johnson, Carnegie, PA
A. Dear Mr. Johnson. You have a good point, but I am afraid I can’t answer it. Maybe one of our readers will have an answer. –HS ,
Harold Stephens
Bangkok
E-mail: ROH Weekly Travel (booking@inet.co.th)
Note: The article is the personal view of the writer and does not necessarily reflect the view of Thai Airways International Public Company Limited. | 
