Beijing and Taipei in Pictures

We left Xi'an for Beijing on Tuesday, February 8th. We made a mad dash into the city and I was able to see the Temple of Heaven across the street from the Pearl Market. This is a picture of the entrance into the grounds.

The Temple of Heaven itself. I am still asking myself how China can be a godless country when it has a temple where the emperors prayed to the heavens and made burnt sacrifices for a good harvest? How does that work?

A close-up of a section of the wall of the temple. If my memory is correct, this building was rebuilt or remodeled in the 1970s so it could be the original structure but not the original artwork. However, it is very beautiful!

There were three openings where visitors could see inside the building. This was one of them. There were several pillars around the hall with an open space in the middle. Very ornate.

I walked over to one of the other buildings which was a museum for the Temple of Heaven. This is a picture of Emperor Yonglin who was the creator of the Temple of Heaven.

One of the seven or eight urns on the grounds where the sacrifices were made. There was also a small building, possibly original, where other sacrifices were burned.

Another building on the temple grounds appeared to have an altar in it. I noticed people saying short prayers as they looked inside. I felt a little bad about taking a picture of a sacred place, but it was so interesting!



As we were leaving to go back to the airport, Sue and I heard some music in an alcove. We walked down and listened for a few minutes. There were seven or eight men and one woman. The men were playing traditional Chinese instruments and the woman was singing. The people watching were singing along and one couple was dancing. It was so cool!

The REAL Temple of Heaven. Imagine that! I saw two temples in one day in two different cities. This is the Taiwan Taipei LDS Temple and is it so beautiful! I loved being anywhere near it--on the grounds and especially inside. It was worth the entire trip just to be here. It was built in 1984 and still looks brand-new.



This is a picture of the street where we were staying. I am taking the picture from the second floor of Patron Housing. You can see the Angel Moroni facing west. You can also see a sign Bountiful Living. An LDS woman owns it and she sells all kinds of Mormon stuff. I bought a silk cover for my scriptures there. In addition, you can see a Catholic Church across the street from the temple. On the north side of the temple is a Catholic university.



Another picture of the temple. From right to left, Sister Maureen Wheatley, Sue Nibley, and me.



After walking onto the ground of the Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Hall, I looked back at the entrance. Very impressive structure.

Along with Spring Festival is the Lantern Festival. This was a display of lanterns in the memorial hall.

Soldiers marching into the huge hall to replace the two soldiers who have been on duty for one hour. they marched in perfect precision to lifting of the leg to the moving or the arms.



Soldiers marching out of the hall and down the steps.




The Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Hall with the Luminary display at dusk.



Here is a bird's eye view of part of the city of Taipei from the #89 floor of the 101 building. Pretty spectacular!





This view shows the hills of Taiwan and the way the city is built around them. In Taiwan, as in China, the building is always up--several stories.




The two arched bridges on the river in the middle of the picture are named after Douglas MacArthur.

Chiang Kai-shek and me! How about that!

This is the pendulum called the tuned mass tamper which regulates the movement of the building from the wind up to 40%. It weighs something like 60,000 tons. In front is the friendly China Bee.



All of these pictures came from the flower market that we visited on Saturday morning. It was a paradise!

Little orange trees. I have really enjoyed the tiny oranges they have in China. They are sweet and easy to peel. So yummy!



Decorated bamboo plant. This was probably decorated for the Chinese New Year.



Above and below, different types of Orchids. There were so many varieties. The climate in Taiwan is warm and humid, perfect for growing so many beautiful flowers. I was enjoying the warm, rainy weather, while the locals were shivering and saying how cold it was this winter. 





Purple Iris--one of my favorite flowers. If you don't believe me, come see my backyard in the spring around May time.




A majestic emperor figure reigns over the flower market.



I have been washing clothes, ironing, shopping, and getting lessons prepared for next week. Vacations are wonderful but the preparation and cleaning up take as much time as the trip itself. I mentioned that I am preparing lessons. School will be starting next week according to the calendar, but I do not yet know my schedule for classes on the new campus nor my classes and schedule on the old campus. All the foreign teachers are in the same boat, so we just shrug our shoulders and hope for the best.

My trip to Taiwan was so much fun! I loved being there and going to the temple and seeing the sights.

I traveled with a fellow teacher named Sue Nibley. Fortunately, she had been to Beijing before and was a more seasoned traveler than I am. Together we were able to navigate around Beijing and Taipei quite well. I got lost once by myself and we got lost together once. Not too bad!

#1 Highlight:

Of course, going to the temple was the biggest highlight of my trip. I was able to go twice a day from Wednesday through Saturday. Two of the sessions were in English, but the rest were in Mandarin, so I wore a headset. I got so that I would take out one ear bud and listen to the Mandarin along with the English. Many of the phrases seem very familiar to me now after living in China for six months, although I do not know exactly what they mean.

They call this the Asian Temple Square because it has the temple and a church office building on the same block. The building houses the offices for the Welfare and Humanitarian, Public Relations, and Translation for the Asian area, the Distribution Center, Family History, and at least one chapel maybe two. They have a set of sister missionaries who show people through a hallway on the first floor, using pictures to explain the mission of the Church. This was the location of the first ward building in Taipei. This temple does not stand out on a hill like some of the temples (Washington DC. for example); nevertheless, it is very impressive and beautiful.

We stayed at Patron Housing, which is directly across the street from the temple, so I could see the temple all the time. We were also next door to the Mission Home and saw elders and sisters everywhere. In fact, there were 11 new missionaries who came in on Wednesday.  I had to remember that I could talk about the Church there in Taiwan.

We left Xi’an at 10:20 on Tuesday morning and landed in Beijing just after noon. We took the shuttle to the Mass Rapid Transit (MRT) and then took the MRT into the city. I saw the Pearl Market (famous place to shop) and the Temple of Heaven. Beautiful! Back to airport and onto Taipei. I would not recommend seeing Beijing in this way—very stressful! We also did the same thing in reverse on the way back, but this time we visited the Pearl Market (again) and Tiananmen Square and walked on the grounds of the Forbidden City. We arrived at the city at 3:35 and they stop selling tickets at 3:30. We were too late! (Sigh!) I also need to go back to Beijing and see the rest of the tourist sites, especially the Great Wall!

We landed in the airport in Taipei at about 11:30 p.m. and changed our money into Taiwan yuan and had to remember that about 30 yuan = $1 US. We went outside and there were several taxis waiting to take people to their destinations. Our problem was how to tell them where we wanted to go. I had printed the address of the temple from the Church website; however, the street said Ai Kou, which is the old way and the taxi drivers could not figure it out. It should have been written Ai Gou. Finally I said, “LDS temple,” still no connection. Then Sue and I said, “Mormon temple.” They knew exactly where that was. We jumped into the taxi and we were there in about 30 minutes.

Another cool fact about the temple is that the Angel Moroni faces west—towards China. Two of the senior missionaries serving in Taipei had been part of the China Teachers Program a few years ago and Sue had met them then. They helped us so much. Elder Wheatley was the one who told us about the Angel Moroni facing west. He said that there are only four temples in the world that do that—Taipei, Nauvoo, and two more (he couldn’t remember the rest). Pretty interesting huh? 

Other Highlights:

Each afternoon we would venture out on the buses and MRT and see different sites. On Wednesday we visited the National Chang Kai-shek Memorial Hall. We arrived close to 5:00 and saw the changing of the guard—last one of the day. Wow! What precision! The grounds were beautiful and they had several pictures, some furniture, and two cars inside the hall. I learned a lot! I am not up on my history, but I guess General MacArthur is pretty popular there. There was a picture with Chang Kai-shek and General MacArthur in the hall.  When we went up on 101 (see Friday), we saw two bridges named after General MacArthur as well.

On Thursday we visited the National Palace Museum up on a beautiful hillside. There were at least three floors with wonderful artifacts, statues, paintings, and calligraphy. The dates were listed from 4000 B.C. to the early 1900s. Very interesting! It was more than we could see in one visit.

On Friday we visited the second tallest building in the world; that is, when they get the one in Dubai finished. The 101 is so amazing! The bottom five floors are a very high-end mall—the higher the floor, the more expensive the store. On the fifth floor, we bought the tickets and stood in line for the elevator. They claim to have the two fastest elevators in the world and I believe it. We went from the 5^th floor to the 89^th floor in just over 33 seconds. I could hardly feel that we were moving. The view was spectacular, although a storm moved in and it started to rain as we were finishing the circuit of windows. This building also had a museum in it. I enjoyed learning about how they built the building and all of the Chinese good luck items involved. I can’t remember very many of them. I know that 1 and 0 are good luck symbols; the elevators travel at 1010 meters per minute. They made sure that the yin and yang of the building were in sync. Also, 7 is a lucky number so (7+1) 8 is even luckier; that is why there are 8 sections to the building.

One of the stories on the historical placards was about the invasion of the island of Dachen by the Chinese in the late 1950s. There were 14 pregnant women who were evacuated to a U.S. naval carrier and gave birth to their babies while on board. There were pictures of all of the women holding their newborn babies. The best part was that at the end of the story, the placard said, “These babies are now 60 years old. WHERE ARE YOU?” I wonder if they found any of them.

Sue walked up the stairs to the 91^st floor where people can go outside and see the view. I was too chicken. The only side open was the west side because of the wind. She could see the tallest spire of the temple from there. We went down the stairs to the 88^th floor and saw the huge tuned mass tamper which reduces the effect of the wind up to 40%. The huge yellow ball is suspended from the 92nd to the 88th floor, and sways like a pendulum to offset movements in the building caused by strong gusts of wind. The architecture of the building is part of its magic as well—not just the yin and yang and the 1 and the 0.

On that same floor, we also discovered an exquisite exhibit of Taiwan coral carvings and oohed and awed over that. They were so beautiful! We rode the elevator down. It went much slower. It took us 47 seconds to go down and I felt it more when my ears popped.

On Saturday morning we went to a flower market underneath a freeway. It is four or five blocks long and contains everything from cut flowers to potted plants, from to soil to furniture. It was so impressive! We wandered down the aisles looking at all the beautiful flowers and enjoying the smells. It was like being in the Garden of Eden. The next section was a Jade Market. We got there a little early so we had to wait for the vendors to set out their wares. We wandered down between the tables looking at everything. The prices were rather high, but I was not particularly attracted to that kind of jade jewelry. However, I found two beautiful coral necklaces and some tea pots. Alas! No money for frills.