Posted on 10/05/2005 6:01:33 PM PDT by Aussie Dasher
SIGHTSEEING in the capital of the world's most populous nation can be a chore. At Mao Zedong's mausoleum in Tiananmen Square, surly guards quickstep thousands of rubbernecking visitors past the Chinese Communist Party chairman's embalmed corpse every day. The Forbidden City, once the seat of emperors, is now open house for insufferable, flag-following tour groups.
The Summer Palace's lake is clogged with day-trippers on tacky, fibreglass pedal boats shaped like cartoon ducks. Beijing's sites are spread across the city, temperatures can top 40C, and without fluency in Mandarin, public transport is as indecipherable as an acupuncturist's handwriting.
Determined to stand out from the crowd, and to maintain a healthy distance from the elbowing masses, we desperately need a more exclusive and sedate means of getting around town. A simple phone call, and the solution rolls up – slowly, menacingly, imperiously – to our hotel the following afternoon.
A diminutive, apple-cheeked young woman with pigtails, kitted out in the ill-fitting grey togs of a cultural revolutionary Red Guard of the late 1960s, holds open the door of the black, bulletproof, hand-tooled CA770 Hong Qi, or Red Flag, limousine, complete with plum-coloured velvet interior.
As we edge into the early evening traffic, the first motorist to spot our wheels hits his brakes and gives way deferentially. Our automotive leviathan was once the runabout of Mao's feared third wife and Gang of Four mainstay Jiang Qing. Back in her glory days any Chinese civilian cutting up this monster would have been rewarded with a one-way trip to a frozen Manchurian gulag.
A Moet cork pops and flutes are produced. Phoebe Wong, personable Canadian general manager of the Red Capital Club restaurant and bar, pours ... and spills. The Red Flag has the suspension of a cheap skateboard. Wong explains how anyone, for $US225 ($293), can enjoy 50 minutes of sedate cruising in the stodgy seat of Chinese power while suffering the ear-splitting Red Detachment of Women revolutionary opera on the CD player, flicking through Mao's Little Red Book and indulging in Russian caviar nibbles.
Edging towards Tiananmen Square at perhaps 30km/h, the top speed of Madame Mao's old banger is considered. Wong smirks and offers, "Well, I think this might just about be it."
Brutal fellow dictator Joseph Stalin presented Mao with five stretch limousines in the 1950s. Vastly impressed by his new wheels, Mao decreed similar cars must be manufactured at home, and 100 Red Flags were produced for the Communist Party leadership.
Clearly, that level of exclusivity commands attention to this day: every Volkswagen, every Nissan, every Flying Pigeon bicycle that starts to overtake us on Beijing's busy streets deliberately slows down. Drivers strain for a glimpse of imagined, long-in-the-tooth dignitaries who could be behind the Red Flag's greying lace curtains.
More heads swivel as we circle Tiananmen Square and sidle by the huge portrait of Mao that adorns Tiananmen Gate. We glide alongside Zhongnanhai, the leafy and secretive compound that houses China's present leadership. As we saunter south of Jingshan Park, our guide declares with a butter-in-mouth smile, "In 1644, the last Ming emperor ... he hung himself from a tree just over there."
Our final destination, however, is the Red Capital, which is nestled in a restored courtyard down a sleepy hutong, one of the narrow and shaded side streets that characterise the old part of the city. Decked out in chintzy Mao-stalgia (think moth-eaten armchairs and porcelain figurines of tortured intellectuals wearing dunces' caps while being harangued by Red Guards), this hideaway is the brainchild of American entrepreneur Laurence Brahm.
Another Red Flag guards the club's entrance. It once belonged to Marshall Chen Yi, a leading military figure who proudly stood alongside Mao at Tiananmen Gate when the new China was established on October 1, 1949. Like Jiang's, Chen's rusting old horse is decorated with three flag motifs along each side, representing "the workers, the peasants and the military". The flag crest on the bonnet symbolises the "unity of Mao Zedong thought". The car is coated with a thick layer of the Gobi Desert following one of the sandstorms that regularly blow in from the north.
Over a fabulous banquet of the Red Capital's signature Zhongnanhai cuisine – including Mao's favourite brain food of fatty pork from distant Hunan province, from where the chairman hailed – Brahm is elusive when asked how he got his capitalist hands on two of the few remaining Red Flags.
Enigmatically, and surprisingly for a man who has been described as the "king of commie kitsch", he quotes the wife of former Nationalist leader and virulent anti-communist Chiang Kai-shek. Once asked where she bought her exquisite jewellery, Soong Mei-ling – considered the most beautiful woman in pre-revolutionary China and remembered as one who loved power and prestige above all else – is said to have replied: "You don't buy jade, you have jade."
I think I'll stick to the beach...
Mao's body on display in China??? That does not suprise me.
Russia still has that old Crock Lenin on display prominatly in Red Square. Once a commie, always a commie
And the only good commie is a dead commie...on display or not!
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