edifices

Photo evidence!

Here I am with my friend Lijuan, who came with her husband to cheer me at the finish. Later, they took  me to a buffet in a fancy hotel, featuring both Western and Chinese food, so I could have the traditional post-marathon binge.  A good friend, indeed.

A couple things I forgot to mention in my first list of thoughts, in my post-marathon haze of endorphin rush/depletion.

During the race,  someone was setting off bunches of fireworks around mile 8, for what reason I’m not sure.  General celebratory glee? 

The photo with which I ended my previous marathon-themed post received much attention throughout the Chinese internet world.  Apparently a popular search on Baidu, the Chinese equivalent of Google, was 尿红墙, or "urine red wall."  One of my friends just today said, "How was the marathon?   I hear there was a problem involving toilets."

The finish—how could I have forgotten that?  Totally memorable, occurring on the plaza between the Olympic Stadium (the “Bird's Nest”) and the Water Cube swimming facility, the two most architecturally memorable parts of the Beijing games.  I have a terrible memory, but still vividly recall my first sighting of the Bird's Nest as it was under construction in 2007.  I was here on sabbatical, on a bus going along the North 4th Ring Road when we passed it.  I was utterly dazzled by the sight of it, this majestic structure going up amidst the mostly blah, dreary Beijing apartment blocks.   Here it is again:

 

This was one of the first of the new wave of Beijing architecture, with much of the city still unexciting today but punctuated by occasional breathtaking or just strange edifices, the most famous example of which may be the new China Central Television (CCTV) Building.

You are not mistaken, it does resemble a pair of pants.

Yet, grandiose architectural statements have been a part of the People's Republic since 1949 when Mao mounted the Tiananmen Gate and declared that "The Chinese people have stood up!"  One of his first projects was to destroy what was left of the Beijing city wall to build broad socialist boulevards, along with creating Tiananmen Square as a place for gatherings of mass politics.  (Interestingly, the critic Dai Jinhua writes that the word often used for "shopping mall" in Chinese these days is the same as that for "Square" or "public plaza," 广场.  There is much to make of that in terms of the shift in China in the past 30 years from a highly public to a privatized society.)   Amusingly but also tragically, apparently the current set of architectural statements have made a positive impression on at least one audience, the North Koreans, as shown in these propaganda posters from Pyongyang:

No Mao suits or Young Pioneers were actually sighted amidst the sea of yellow race shirts at the marathon finish line.