To be totally honest with you, Beijing cuisine didn’t blow me away. It’s made up of beans, grease, and a distinct muteness of flavour. After a tiring day, even the world famous duck was quite lackluster. Drenched in oil, I felt my stomach recoil at every bite. I drank plenty of tea to calm it down, and turned in for the night, dreaming vivid colours to digest my long and busy day. Because even if I did not enjoy dinner, Beijing still astonished me at every step.

I arrived before sunset, the city still half asleep. Its first workers were already well on their way, but still, the red, green, and blue lines of the metro were quite deserted. Not so on the ten-laned boulevards that cut Beijing into neat plots. Taxis looking for clients slowed down the long black cars of diplomats heading into the office, and I crossed traffic along a narrow concrete pedestrian bridge, on my way to The Temple of Heaven.

Pictures fail to express the elegant but looming presence of the three-tiered pagoda atop its elaborate marble plinth. Thousands of fine gilt dragons flow over its brightly painted wooden structure, glinting in the first sunlight of the day. The city’s pensioners have swarmed to the temple’s park to jog, stretch, practice tai chi in groups of five or ten, and throw crumbs to its birds and squirrels. One with a fluffy tail sniffed my boot, but found no food there, and retreated to the nearest juniper. 

Twice yearly the emperors of first the Ming and then the Qing Dynasties performed long and intricate rites at this temple. Its blue-tiled roof signified an extension to heaven, which either answered or refused the emperor’s request for timely rains and plentiful harvests. A single hiccup in the day-long ceremony would have loomed as a dark omen over the coming months, sure to bring misfortune to the middle kingdom. Rituals were not to be broken.

To protect himself from misguided troublemakers, and instill a sense of smallness in all of his many subjects, the emperor constructed the Forbidden City at the heart of his realm. On a scale that surpassed most cities outside of China at the time, enormous courts and palaces at once forced a mix of fear and respect out of any visitors, while, more practically, housing an army of bureaucrats and administrators, fit to steer the state. They had a law for every instance, a punishment for every offence, and records in the archives for both.

As I walk around New China, guards man important crossroads and ask for my passport at the entrances of busy streets or metro stations. Cameras swivel to follow my every step, sending the footage to a new kind of archive. The applications I need to navigate and pay in China collect more data still, keeping track of what I buy, and where I go. But as long as I keep my respect for the necessary rituals, never disobey their rules, and express a meek respect for the powers that be, I need not fear anything. China is safe.

And so I learn, clearly and vividly, that although the names have changed, the titles, uniforms, and procedures, beneath the surface, the same old structure remains. A layer of red paint, but the emperor is still the emperor. He rules invisibly, and as long as you follow his law, you need not fear anything.