Jeff Booth is the Assistant Editor at Student World Traveler - a free publication for budget travelers and hostelers. A selection of Jeff's photography can be viewed by clicking here.
I asked him for tea as I came in off the street into the shade beneath the great stone gate. Mr. Xue, the curio seller, called down the row of stalls for someone to bring hot water and a bowl. I collapsed into a chair and someone handed me a white porcelain bowl with a blue design, filled with pale green tea. I was completely surrounded by ancient China (or at least decent replicas from factories in Shenzen): scroll paintings on silk, opium pipes, golden statues of fat, laughing buddhas, posters for cosmetics from the 20's. The old men and young women pulled up stools or squatted around me and began the usual friendly barrage of questions. Mr. Xue pulled me to the side later, and offered in conspiratorial tones an earthenware object that mostly resembled a shard of a red ceramic planting pot,  whispering very old, hen lao de, Shang dynasty. I know enough of my dynasties to doubt his claim of a 3,000 year old relic, and laughed him off gently. But China is like that, bits of ancient history right under your nose, a relevant sense of history that I, as an American, am completely overwhelmed by.
That might sound like an understatement, bits of history, for one of the great original civilizations of mankind. Every other Chinese person I met, whether they were leaning out of their train berth, holding melons in each hand at the market, or repairing the rusty flywheel of a bike from another century, reminded me of the fact that China has 5,000 years of continuous history. Yet there were their counterparts, those who explained to me that China had moved on, overcome its feudal past and was ready for the 21st century. They carried their cell phones conspicuously, wore beepers to their weddings, and dreamed of Shenzen, Hong Kong, Vancouver, and Los Angeles. It was a common argument among them as to which city in China was the most modern: Beijing, Shanghai, or Shenzen. No one ever bothered to define modern.
Off Gulou Street are the Drum Clock Towers, a pair of massive stone and red wood roofed archways that originally kept the pace of time for Beijingers, before everyone sported fake Rolexes. I climbed to the top and looked around. It was one of the first clear blue days, signalling the start of Beijing's crisp, beautiful fall and weather. From above the city, I could see the Second Ring Road, where the low cluttered tile hutong roofs and green trees disappear and the Lego block high rises stand like a peripheral army of white fortresses. At the base of the tower the maze of the Jaio Dai Kou hutongs (traditional alleys of Beijing) thrust their peaked, angular roofs up and swarms of people, like ants from up above, scurried and cycled the narrow lanes. I pulled out my 40's era Chinese  bellows camera and took a black and white photo. Later I would compare it to historical photos in textbooks: only the tell-tale square blocks and construction cranes on the horizon signified the change.
Of course, Beijing has changed, and changed dramatically. Time, Newsweek and the New York Times have all run front pages on the rapid modernization of China, the roller coaster speed of post-Mao society and economy. Less than a hundred years ago, when my grandmother was born, this was the seat of the last great Chinese Emperor, living in luxury in the gilded Forbidden City (now crammed with tourists). Just under a half century ago, when my parents were learning to walk, Mao Zedong filled Tiananmen Square with more than a million people proclaiming the birth of a new China, and in that same square when I was celebrating a summer vacation the world watched a crucial, terrible night in the path of modern China.
Today, people fly kites in Tiananmen Square, under the glazed eyes of Mao's portrait, and small time capitalists hawk everything from postcards to Groucho Marx masks. Every sunrise and sunset a crowd of several hundred Chinese gather to watch the raising and lowering of the national flag. Chinese tourists from far flung provinces pose for photos in front of Mao's portrait, just as Americans smile and say cheese for snapshots in front of Mt. Rushmore. I asked Liang Jian, a high school student from Liaoniang province who was visiting Beijing for the first time, whether he though Mao would like modern China, the capitalism with Chinese characteristics, McDonald's. He laughed, and said probably, because he always wanted a strong, modern China.
Yet, despite the political upheavals, the sleek Mercedes of the nouveau riche, the dozen McDonald's scattered through the city, I did not feel this modernization that most Chinese proclaimed. Yes, much of the traditional architecture is gone (and the hutongs are being torn down at an alarming rate), Communist uniforms of blue and grey are a rarity, and Market Economics is the new king. Every bookstore I entered had a copy of George Sorros' and Warren Buffet's biographies on prominent display. I did not find Westernized images of the mythical Far East. But I did find that the essential Beijing, the essential China, is still very much alive. Turn down a back alley, get utterly lost in the hutongs, stop for fried squid in the 500 year old Da Shi Lin street market and you will find what is not on CNN or in tourist borchures: vibrancy, energy, a cultural history that is still relevant. My friends there often quote Li Bai and other Tang Dynasty poets. This is in stark contrast to where I live in the States, where history is defined by being in syndicated reruns. Chinese MTV and Kentucky Fried Chicken cannot  put more than a dent into a city whose history is as long as the Great Wall.
In '96 a friend and I went to the Great Wall at Simatai, about 3 hours from Beijing. It was a desolate, beautiful site, with the stone parapets snaking along a dragon's back mountain ridge and crumbling stones from the Ming Dynasty stretching as far as we could see. I returned this year to feel that sense of perspective again. As I haggled with the bus driver for my fare, I saw the first section of the wall peek through low hanging clouds, and running up alongside the mountain face, a blue and yellow ski lift. A gate and guard blocked the footpath I knew. Two dozen restaurants lined the thoroughfare, small concrete rooms with a coal fired stove and noodles boiling in a blackened pot. I climbed the Great Wall t-shirts. I almost threw up at the vulgar display of modernity. Nevertheless, my friend and I bought our tickets, and began making our way up the mountain, immediately turning west, away from the crowds and the monstrous ski lift, and towards the setting sun. In half an hour, we were alone, except for two local peasants who lived in the countryside, near the 14th tower, who walked with us.
One of them, Zheng, walked next to me, and told me of his two children, both of whom are going school and how he'll try to send the oldest boy into Beijing for further education. He did not complain about walking the distance between forty towers daily, up the steep slopes and scrambling down the eroded sections of the wall. That night, he brought egg fried rice, and cooked potatoes and eggplant; we sat in a watchtower by a fire that left a blackened scar on the stone wall. He smoked his long pipe, tapping the tobacco out into the ashes of the fire. Looking out over the  mountainous landscape shrouded in black, the stars and our fire provided the only light. A few yellow specks nestled in a valley might have been Zheng's village. All was silent, save for the crackling of the fire, and Zheng slightly humming a folk tune; time stopped.
The sun rose over the battered stones of the Wall just as it has for centuries, white fog that lay like secrets in green valleys, and we walked on towards Jinshanling.
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