Rediscovering Beijing: Finding the Elephants
Editor's Note: Asia Obscura's Andy Deemer has been kind enough to let us rummage through his archives for some of his best posts from his Beijing days. We're sharing them here to give you some inspiration to get out and explore our city.
On using an 1897 guidebook to explore modern Beijing, my adventures begin with the elephants.
A few hundred yards westward of (the Shun-chih-men) is the place for the Imperial elephants, the Hsün-hsiang-so, a large enclosure in which the elephants of the Court are kept… The intelligent animals are taught to salute the Emperor by kneeling down, and receive a kind of adoration.
A central-Beijing stable with kneeling elephants? How much cooler can you get?! I had to find this place.
But almost immediately I ran into problems. I was using an 1897 travel book and the street names have all changed. The author uses an archaic transliteration scheme for Chinese words. He writes Ssu where today one would write Si. His kao might be a gao or a kou or who knows what.
But using a 1930s map as a Rosetta Stone, I started to find clues. His Shun-chih-men is now Xuanwumen. The actual gate (men) is gone, but it’s been replaced with an identically-named subway station. At least this removed any need for a pony and Mexican dollars.
But walking out of the subway, I knew everything was wrong.
First of all, I should be walking alongside a city wall. This is how he described it:
a stone foundation and two brick walls filled with mud; those of the northern city are about 40 feet high: at the base about 50 feet thick, at the top about 36 feet, and defended by massive buttresses at intervals of 300 yards
Read the rest of this post at AsiaObscura.
Photos: Andy Deemer
