Tranquility Amid Teeming Beijing

I was in Beijing for a couple of days.

As always, I passed through Tiananmen Square, a place heavy with memories for me as it is for literally hundreds of millions of other people.

I was staying in the western part of the city near a restored section of the old city wall.

Beijing was ringed by this wall until Mao had it torn down in the 1960s.

I had always wanted to visit the Tianning Temple pagoda, the oldest structure in Beijing. It was not far, so I took a taxi there.

Jasper Becker, in his wonderful book, "City of Heavenly Tranquility," wrote that "Beijing first became a city of importance in AD 936 under the rule of a northern tribe, the Khitans, who established the Liao dynasty (907-1125)."

"The Khitans were Buddhists who built many temples and monasteries in a city with a circumference of 12 miles and walls 30 feet high with eight gates. The most poignant reminder of their rule in Beijing is Tianning Temple, the Temple of Heavenly Tranquility, which somehow survived into the twentieth century as a gramophone factory."

The word Cathay, once the name Europeans used for China, is derived from the word "Khitan." Tianning Temple was finally restored and opened to the public in 2004.

The pagoda is solid, made of brick and stone to mimic the wooden pagodas of the time. The pagoda once stood at one end of the central axis of the Liao capital. There was a twin at the other end of the axis, now gone. The pagodas, built in about 1100 AD, were the tallest structures in the capital.

The place is an active temple, open from 9 to 4 and without the ticket booth and trinket shop that has turned most of the city's temples into tourist stops.

A closeup of a prayer cushion.

These people were walking slowly around the base of the pagoda chanting prayers that they had written on slips of paper - presumably given them by one of the gray-robed monks that live at the temple.

An offering of water or liquor, I don't know which.

A nice tableau.