Six weeks in Beijing
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 December 2020
Summary
Letter 2: Beijing, 3 October
Dear Puck,
3 October, and no hotpot, eels or grapes. I hope that the weather in Holland is as nice as it is here; after a few rainy days, we have wonderful autumn weather again. Roland gave me your letter on Sunday 27 September, he had received it on Saturday. This means that a letter (dated Sunday) takes a whole week to get here, if sent via the Consul-General in Hong Kong. I think that it won't take more than five days if sent directly. It's great to have your news! I have made a note of the reopening of the Ned. Hand. Mij. as the ‘General Bank of the Netherlands’ for later in Hong Kong. I am writing everything down in my diary, including the most trivial things (such as the names of dishes I’ve eaten).
We are slowly starting to adjust to life in Peking. Our days are extremely busy, not only due to the events that Luxingshe is organizing for us, but also because we are wandering around all kinds of neighbourhoods, where we are learning and noting a great deal (and the big bosses at Luxingshe, who are not at all happy about this, are unable to do anything about it).
In the diary, we find out how this went:
24 September
Our first walk through the city, the two of us: went to the Xidan market and surroundings, strolled around everywhere and looked at everything, went into shops, bought a cookie from an old lady in a small hutong, et cetera. Interesting things everywhere, too many to write down. Toddlers in open-crotch pants, traditional Chinese pharmacies complete with (very expensive) Ginseng, weighed out in traditional scales; older women with bound feet, and to my great amazement, also a bare-breasted woman (suckling an infant), babies in bamboo carriages, et cetera, et cetera. Food abundant and very cheap by our standards. But we wondered how much one earns, for example, if one is selling tea on a stall, or one of the (sometimes very old) trishaw cyclists.
Whatever the case, people usually look well fed; in the smaller hutongs there is a great deal of poverty, which is not surprising.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Three Months in Mao's ChinaBetween the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, pp. 35 - 82Publisher: Amsterdam University PressPrint publication year: 2017