Quick, visit Beijing before everyone finds out

Tourists within the Forbidden City congregate on a massive courtyard that could hold imperial audiences of up to 100,000. Picture / Geoff Cumming

Huddled in a bomb shelter beneath the very epicentre of Communist intrigue, the Westerners are unnerved when a Chinese flunkey carrying a gun walks in. He places the weapon on a stool, says nothing and leaves. The Westerners lick suddenly dry lips and exchange worried glances.

Moments pass before our taciturn waiter returns, picks up the gun and ignites its gas flame to light our cocktails.

Mine's a Long March, billed as Chairman Mao's favourite. Here in the residential heart of Beijing, beneath streets where powerbrokers plotted and partied, is a themed bar which shows that, even for Communist diehards, nothing is sacred when there's a yuan in it.

The brick shelter was built beneath a courtyard house in 1969 on the orders of Defence Minister Lin Biao, Vice-President of the Communist Party at the height of tensions between China and the Soviet Union. These days it's the kitsch centrepiece of the Red Capital Residence, a pricey small hotel ($272 a night, double).

Dimly lit by kerosene lanterns, the shelter has an ambience they'd call intimate down at the Viaduct (if health and safety laws allowed). The ceiling is covered with camouflage netting. On the walls are plaques of Mao and military paraphernalia such as water bottles, caps and kitbags.

Even the Defence Minister gets a cocktail named after him, Lin Biao's Crash.

This is the new Beijing, where even the officially revered Mao Zedong is bowing to market forces - and a little mockery. High rollers can wait out the city's notorious traffic jams in the back of Madame Mao's custom-built black limo, for hire at $350 an hour with champagne and caviar. It sits outside the Red Capital's nearby theme restaurant.

On the streets, you can barter for Cold War-era propaganda posters or buy military shoulder bags emblazoned with Mao's image.

A section of the underground tunnels which Mao ordered built when Soviet invasion seemed imminent, has been opened to the public. Inevitably, the tunnel leads to a tourist shop.

It's all quite in keeping with Beijing's history of reinventing itself.

Since it was razed by Genghis Khan in 1215 through to Mao's cultural revolution, when the historic city walls were torn down, the Chinese capital's history has been one of destruction and rebirth.

In the recent cycle of spectacular, foreign investment-fuelled growth, temples and hutong - the maze-like avenues and alleyways where ordinary Beijingers live - have made way for high rises and highways.

As the city prepares to host the 2008 Olympics, the pace of change has stepped up even further. Cranes loom over vast swathes of cleared housing and industrial estates. China is said to use 40 per cent of the world's cement; most of it, surely, in Beijing.

Construction-site dust is claimed to be a bigger contributor to Beijing's appalling air pollution than vehicle fumes.

Thankfully (though a little late), the city governors have recognised that what's left is worth preserving - not least for the tourism potential.

A $75 million restoration programme is underway on important heritage buildings while new regulations will safeguard old precincts.

Beijing has been off-limits for 50 years, but it's now easy for Westerners to experience this collision of two worlds - a city growing cosmopolitan as multinationals move in but retaining much of its Chinese tradition and mystique.

What remains of Beijing's built heritage is as impressive, if not as ancient, as more familiar European icons. Its Acropolis is the Forbidden City, its St Peter's Square the Temple of Heaven, its Hyde Park the Summer Palace.

And nothing compares with the Great Wall, 90km north of town (although it too has suffered its share of revisionism and reconstruction).

Such attractions offer insight into not only Beijing's extraordinary past but a cultural and spiritual heritage which remains alive.

But it's the glimpses of daily life in the hutong, morning Tai Chi rituals in the park, calligraphers practising their craft with water on the pavement that capture the essence of Beijing.

You don't have to venture far from swept-up boulevards with their Gucci and Prada shops to find the hutong. Here, extended families crammed into small brick houses carry on seemingly immune to the seismic changes taking place nearby. They gather in the street around makeshift tables to play cards, chess or Chinese chequers; cook up dumplings or vegetable-filled flatcakes from outdoor cookers, or wash (themselves or their clothes) from a bucket.

In these labyrinthine passageways are the street traders, the bicycle repairers, the dust, the stench from communal squat toilets, the colourful markets and aromatic food stalls offering the fresh, the familiar and deep-fried goat intestines.

With only government employees receiving pensions, and few able to afford health insurance, extended family life is still the norm for many residents, who mostly earn below the US$600 ($857) a month average income.

Through the state-run Hutong Authority, visitors can arrange to drop in for a home-cooked lunch where the hosts wheel in delicious courses until you can eat no more.

We visited Li Liu, a mother of two and her husband Li Shao Ming. From a two-burner gas stove in the cramped kitchen of her 6m by 5m home, she produced a delicious array of subtly flavoured dishes - pork dumplings, Sichuan-spiced stir fry, bok choi in coconut cream, water chestnut, sliced pork and potatoes, courgette, cooked cucumber and more. Mr Li brought us beer and cajoled us to eat more.

Through an interpreter, we learned the couple had lived in the same house for 28 years. Shao Ming was a retired policeman while Liu, a factory worker, had to retire at 55 so a younger person could work. A serene woman, Liu was a Tai Chi instructor and a football and basketball nut who was very happy that Beijing had won the Olympics.

They lived comfortably, a TV in the lounge and the air-conditioning on mid-summer (it's very cheap, apparently); in the cold of winter they rely on a wetback. Hosting tourists for lunch was a useful way to supplement their pension.

Eleven families lived around their courtyard, sharing a single toilet.

Within the hutong are many of the city's unheralded attractions: remnants of the old city walls, historic archways and courtyard dwellings converted into museums - or, in Red Capital's case, upmarket accommodation.

You might even stumble across the Red Capital Residence or its nearby sister restaurant, the Red Capital Club, where the menu includes Raise the Red Lantern (a prawn entree), and Dream of Empress Dowager (sesame buns filled with spicy beef).

Both venues are converted courtyard houses in a district at the centre of political life during the Qing Dynasty and the Republican era.

In a lounge filled with Communist-era memorabilia, you can read Mao texts, sit in Lin Biao's chair, or pick up an old black phone and listen to a stirring speech by Mao.

A second lounge is a walk-in museum, a shrine to the Qing dynasty.

But Old Beijing is fast making way for New Beijing. Many hutong have been levelled for apartments, office blocks and road widening as the capital struggles to keep pace with China's economic growth.

As the Olympic Games approach, more hutong have had to make way for new apartments and road widening.

The Olympics are not just giving Beijing an infrastructural boost, they are contributing to the city's changing face with striking new architecture which, unsurprisingly, not everyone likes.

To ask locals about these changes is to get a sense of how the Party line continues to dominate both media and public opinion. It is inevitable the old areas must go for intensive housing, they say, and the Government helps the (mainly elderly) displaced residents to take out bank loans to live in apartments.

Living conditions in some areas verge on squalid and, with incomes rising in Beijing, sanitary and footpath improvements are broadly welcomed.

There are disconcerting sights beyond the hutong, too: disabled beggars cradling babies in the subway; or worse, on the toxic roadside; Europeans taking newly-adopted babies for a last stroll before heading for the airport; or worse, exposing them to the cacophony of Chinese opera.

A Starbucks has opened in the Forbidden City. To wander the city is to risk sensory overload.

Built on a vast flat plain, Beijing is laid out like a giant chess board, faithful to the vision of early Ming Dynasty emperor Yongle.

In theory, the grid street pattern, with Tiananmen the centrepiece, is easy to navigate. But in the flat landscape, landmarks disappear behind high rises of uniform design and, with the sun mostly hidden behind the midsummer "mist", it's just possible you'll get disoriented.

There's no better place to get your bearings than the Planning and Exhibition Hall, a high-tech shrine to town planning.

Its movie theatre has 3D movies that take you through Beijing's development from the Han Dynasty (206BC to 220AD) to the Olympic future in no time.

The main attraction is a huge model of the city which you gaze on from a mezzanine floor, so detailed you can see where you've been, where you're going and where your hotel is.

Wherever you go, you will not be alone. It's a place where Westerners are still a distinct minority; though Beijing is teeming with tourists, they are mostly Chinese.

Be prepared to haggle for goods and to ward off constant harassment from hawkers and students who want to "practise my English" - then invite you home to look at, and buy, their artworks.

It's possible to eat well here on $10 a day from state-regulated street stalls or hutong shops offering skewered meats (and more exotic delights), or minced pork or beef with bok choy and coriander in a bun, corn and courgette crepes or dumplings with pork fillings, all washed down with cheap local lager.

The top attractions are still relatively cheap, the Forbidden City is the most expensive at around $10 but you could spend half a day there.

Yes, Beijing remains one of those "quick, before it gets discovered" destinations. But things may change quickly. Go soon, before the Olympics bring about a cultural revolution to rival Genghis Khan or Mao.

* Geoff Cumming visited Beijing courtesy of Cathay Pacific, Travel Indochina and Adventure World.  Checklist: Beijing, China

Getting there

Cathay Pacific has up to 12 flights a week from Auckland to Hong Kong, with connections to twice-daily flights from Hong Kong to Beijing. Contact your travel agent for air fare and accommodation packages or check the Cathay Pacific website.

Travel Indochina conducts small group tours using local and western guides with a knack for finding grassroots gems and the route less travelled. Visits to Beijing are usually combined with other cities. Adventure World are the local agents for Travel Indochina.

Getting around

Roads are not for the faint-hearted. Give-way rules are a last resort and pedestrian crossings merely show where to cross - pedestrians must still give way to traffic.

Taxis, regulated and cheap, are a reliable way to get to inner-city sights but painstakingly slow in rush hour, which lasts most of the day.

Rickshaws are a good alternative, using side roads next to main thoroughfares.

An east-west subway line and a circle line flank the central city. More subways will be in place for the Olympics.

Shopping

The Qianmen hutong area, near Tiananmen, has cheap clothing and curiosity shops selling everything from Ming vases to Mao mugs.

Yashou clothing market in Sanlitun is a department store full of counterfeit clothing, DVDs, CDs and electronic goods. Good hagglers can strike a bargain.

On Sundays, the Panjaiyuan Market is the place for souvenirs, cheap T-shirts, books and Communist propaganda posters.