Beijings underground City.

Kat, My Darling Wife, got me the idiots guide to Beijing the other day. It was better that the others I have had access to , as it has larger type and the maps are a wee bit better to see wit h eyes that have gotten old with age. Plus this seemed to be the hipsters back  street guide, which appealed to me somewhat.

One of the big highlights to me in the guide was the Underground City.. apparently a vast complex of deep underground nuclear bomb shelters ordered to be built by the chairman by the happy people of china in thew 1960's to deter the threat by the imperialist running dogs..

THIS I had to see. There was only one small problem. The government shut the tourist site down cold in 2008.

Undeterred, I took the cab to Quinmen, and got dropped outside tons of modern sky-rises and after a couple of misguided questions to some of the locals, I was directed down an alley that looked like it was some sort of service exit.
200 meters later, I saw that the alley was a dump-off to what can only be described as 3 city blocks of rubble. the remains of an entire neighborhood. Kat and others have told me that the Government has been and still is, leveling entire neighborhoods to make way for office complexes and high rise apartment buildings. well. here they were.

I walked down streets that had both sides uncleanly leveled. there were parts of buildings left here and there, and those structures left had the telltale signs of human occupants. makeshift clotheslines, and cooking fires.

Still. I had A mission. I wanted to see the underground city. I asked a couple of the locals, pointed to my guide-map, and was directed further down the rubble city, oddly enough, 1 city block from the highrises.

I found a hospital worker, Chang Yee, who was on his lunch break. Thankfully he spoke English and he took me to the exact spot. along the way he told me that my hopes for going in were pretty slim. in retrospect I should have asked him why the Government shut it down, as getting someone who speaks even marginal english is a rarity in this neck of the hood.

The outside of the building had the peeling paint and decay of a ancient tourist attraction. My reasoning of talking to the neighbors, as this is supposed to be a massive underground complex, turned out to be fruitless and somewhat hostile. At first encounter, people seemed friendly, but upon seeing my mission, as pointed out in the guide, hands crossed, eyes closed. nothing to see here, go away.

After speaking with roughly 15 of the locals, all having the same negative reaction, and getting curious looks from others up the street i decided that maybe it was time to explore something else. the bunker isn't going anywhere, and I figure I will be able to find someone who will talk the international language, cold hard cash, sometime in the future.

I also noticed some of the Houtons had large deposits of freshly dug dirt outside of them, but couldn't figure out if this was somehow related to the underground bunkers, but that was an exploration for another day.

The Cab Driver who brought me to the area earlier, had dropped me about a half mile from the derelict bunker doors, so i made my way back to the drop point, towards the leveled blocks.

I was able to get my way through some of the old doors, that were designed to keep people out of the debris zone and found that some structures still remained from the deconstruction, and there were families living inside them. Amid all the chaos, people were still taking care of their hovels.

The people i encountered were not inclined to talk, a fact that I surmised to being that they were not really supposed to be there.

after walking past the inhabited hovels and not getting much of a warm reception, I decided to explore the hollowed out shells of the other buildings.

It was going through these buildings that I met an older gentleman i will just call Kenny. I stumbled into his squat accidently and found him laying on his cot, amid empty water bottles, and refuse. the air was acrid and smelled of urine and the walls were blacked with soot from his open cooking fire.
He was not looking well, his feet seemed swollen, but he was well enough to yell at me to get the hell out with my camera. i tried to stumble across an apology in Chinese, but it was a feeble effort at best. it was time for me to leave.

it took me only 5 minutes to walk what looked like a war zone to the main city street filled with luxury high rises and high priced wine shops. this bothered the shit out of me. I waited for a cab outside a 2 story high Mcdonalds. I was hungry, but couldn't bring myself to eat.

I decided what I had to do. I walked to one of the local supermarkets, and bought 2 gallon jugs, and a couple of carry size containers of water, 3 Tsing To fresh beers and a pack of Dunhill reds and walked back to the rubble town.

I had no idea what reaction Kenny would have, but at this point i was past the point of going back on the idea. I stepped into his squat, set the water and beers down, and  asked wo neng ma..? or Can I...?, a phrase I usually reserve for asking the cab drivers if I can smoke..

Kenny just looked at me for a minute, and then he scrambled to dust off an old rice bag filled with who the fuck knows what, and put it down on a cinder block for me to sit on. I opened one of the waters, which he accepted drank half down at a shot.

I took out my old pack of dunhills and took 2 out, offering one to him. we bowed at each other and he lit mine before feebly lighting his.

The next ten minutes were spent trying to understand each other, and the dictionary i had was pretty useless. he did get the fact that my name is Stech, and I cant really figure out what his was, but it started with a K sound, so I just called him Ken.

Ken offered me a bit of his food from an old can, but I declined, unsure of what it actually was, but not wanting to offend, I changed the subject by taking out my camera and showing him some of the pictures I had taken. The one thing that I was able to gather through is that there are ways into the bunker, but the police seem to take a dim view of it (as evidenced by my mimicking a police siren and ken shaking his head in agreement)

Ken took out an aged envelope, and showed me a picture of himself, it had to be from the 70's or 80's, in full dress uniform. Proud and rigid in a soldiers stance. you could cut your fingers on the crease in his uniform.  Ken had tears in his eyes as he was trying to explain his life to me, but i couldn't understand a word, much to my frustration.


It was time for me to leave, more from my frustration and new determination to actually sit down in Manderine classes, so i can start documenting stories not based on bullshit sign language. and empathetic facial expressions.

I brought out my camera again, but I already knew what Kens reaction would be, and I didnt blame him at all. He didn't want his picture taken, not like this.

I wouldn't either.