The mandate of heaven means you can control the weather

This might be called the Peking edition, for we were in Peking during the 60th anniversary celebrations – during, but not for. After spending a smoggy 30th September admiring the Bird’s Nest and the Water Cube (oblong would be more accurate) and enjoying the 798 art district, the tour guide insisted that we should not go anywhere near Tiananmen Square on 1st October itself. The whole historic centre was marked off behind a security ring, she explained. If you ventured inside, you would not be allowed out until the show was all over some ten hours later. This gave a new meaning to The Forbidden City.

Off we went instead out of town, to the Great Wall at the crack of dawn. Since we last visited the wall more than 20 years ago, an expressway has been built which makes getting there quicker and easier but more prosaic. The coach took us not to Badaling, the stretch familiar to generations of tourists including Richard Nixon, but to a newer and steeper section where you have the choice between tackling a 75-degree incline to the left or a mere 45-degrees to the right.

I went right, having taken in the guide’s warning that many found that whilst 75 degrees is surprisingly manageable going up, it is also surprisingly formidable coming down when you can see how sharp the rise (and the potential fall) really is. Leaving taitai at the gatehouse nursing her bad back to enjoy the patriotic martial music blaring from loudspeakers, I made it to the end of the restored portion and have the photos to prove it.

 

The air was perfect, clean and sharp, the sky clear with a few light, high clouds. The air force took credit for this, claiming patriotically to have ensured the parade would not be rained on by seeding the clouds a day or two before. They even said that this explained the nasty fog the day before. No explanation though of how, if that was so, the Hong Kong Observatory’s 5-day forecast for Peking at the beginning of the week was able to be spot-on: fog on Wednesday, clearing with light cloud on Thursday and sunshine for the rest of the week.

Their long march begins

So there I was, high on the wall, photographs taken, listening to the martial strains percolating upwards, and trying to spot taitai far below when a white stretch limousine drew up to the big gate. Followed by another, even stretchier; and then another, and another. Foreign ambassadors fitting in a little early morning sightseeing before returning to Peking for the big parade, I thought: wonder whether they’ll choose 45 degrees or 75.

A large crowd gathered below. Maybe it was a president instead, or some African dictator. Then the military music stopped, to be replaced by … the wedding march.

A large group of couples, 60 of them naturally, had elected to tie the knot on the great day at the great wall. By the time I got down there, the party was in full swing. The brides were all in long white dresses; the grooms in smart suits; and not a Mao jacket in sight.

The prescience of Mr Hall

The happy couples were not the only ones dressing up. This was the first holiday that I’ve been on that required a pinstripe suit and tie. The tour company kindly arranged for us to pierce the security ring on the Saturday evening for a banquet for overseas Chinese at the Great Hall of the People. We all had to dress for the occasion, as you do for these Communist functions.

 

As our coach edged through the throngs in the square, throngs of the intensity that you get only in China, towards our privileged 12-course, 45-table dinner with entertainment during and after, I couldn’t help wonder what Mao would have made of it all. My mind went back more than 40 years to when China was in turmoil. In Britain we saw pictures of frenzied people all wearing identical, dull clothes, waving a little red book and chanting ferocious slogans. They seemed, well, different from us. Mr Hall, the master in charge of our class at school had explained to his disbelieving pupils that the two great powers would one day be joined by a third, China.

The great parade in Peking on 1st October 2009 was as much to mark the coming of that day as to celebrate 60 years’ of the People’s Republic. Indeed I wonder how many of the older people amongst the throngs, those who can remember the great, unmentionable Cultural Revolution, were secretly celebrating not 60 years of New China but 30 years of new China. For it is only the second half of those 60 years that is worth celebrating.

Yet, as far as I could see, there were no portraits of Deng Shiu Ping on display at Tiananmen Square.

Beijing duck just doesn’t taste the same

The more observant of you will have noticed that I call the capital city of China by its proper name in English, Peking.

Or at least in British English, for “Beijing” is the pinyin transliteration of the Mandarin pronunciation and its use by English speakers is a modern affectation, adopted by Americans at about the time that Nixon visited China in 1972, probably to curry favour in Peking. Its use is founded upon a false premise: that the function of the proper name of a foreign city in English is to approach as closely as possible the sound of the name of that city in the tongue of the people who live there.

This affectation is has spread to Indian placenames of course, solid Bombay being pushed out by somehow frivolous Mumbai, dear old Calcutta pointlessly replaced by Kolkata and Madras displaced by something unrecognisable. Strange though that the affectation hasn’t spread to names on the European continent: think of Paris and Cologne and Rome. Could there be some colonial guilt at play?

The true function of an English name is to provide for native speakers of the language an easily pronounced and remembered label by which to refer to that city. They do the same in other languages, not least Cantonese, which has its own name for Peking, which sounds like Bucking.

The merit of Peking, and for that matter of Canton, is that it is simpler than the transliterations which are now regarded as proper. So, like Chris Patten, I will be sticking with Peking.

Malcolm Merry is Associate Professor of Law at the University of Hong Kong and a Hong Kong barrister. He is the author of Hong Kong Tenancy Law (4th ed, LexisNexis 2003) and co-author (with Paul Kent) of Building Management in Hong Kong (2nd ed, LexisNexis 2008).