Beijing is a short but sharply observed stop in the diary’s 1982 travel sequence. The entries resist a single postcard image of the city: monumental sights sit beside a bird market, a hotel infestation, children performing for successive tour groups, and the anxious wait for a flight out. Their significance lies in this accumulation. Beijing is encountered through movement and scheduled visits, but also through the narrator’s attention to the people and practical difficulties that interrupt the itinerary.

A brief stop on the itinerary

The diary marks Monday, November 1, 1982, with the heading “Peking,” its name for Beijing. A two-hour car ride precedes the visit to the Great Wall of China, and the party later travels by bus to the Ming Tombs. The entries do not give a full account of the journey into the city; instead, they establish Beijing through a succession of excursions, distances, and transport. On November 3, the day begins at 6:30 with what the narrator calls another crew day, followed by a bus trip to the Summer Palace. The next dated entry, November 4, places the travelers at the airport preparing to leave for Hong Kong. This compressed sequence makes the city a temporary base for sightseeing rather than a setting followed over an extended period.

Monuments and the change of scale

The Great Wall first meets the narrator’s expectations as something he had been putting down; seeing it changes that judgment. He describes it as staggering and notes that the group took the left side because it was less steep and less crowded. The observation keeps the encounter physical and practical: the Wall is not only a celebrated landmark but a route to be chosen and climbed. The entry also records Chinese visitors photographing themselves and soldiers visiting with their girlfriends. Those ordinary uses of the site coexist with its monumental scale. The narrator compares the approach to walking up to the Empire State Building, using a familiar landmark to make the experience legible without diminishing his surprise.

The Ming Tombs produce a similar response. Reached by bus after the Wall, they are also described as staggering, and the journey there takes another two hours. The visit fills the afternoon. Together, the two excursions organize Beijing around places that require travel and time, rather than around a continuous street-level account of the city. The diary’s repeated emphasis on scale and distance shows how sightseeing becomes the structure of the stay: each major destination resets the day, while the bus and car rides measure the effort of reaching it.

Markets, performances, and the people encountered

On November 3, the group visits a bird fair where people gather to sell birds, worms, and spiders. The diary gives this market a different rhythm from the monumental excursions: its subject is what people do with their time and what they trade. The visit to the Summer Palace later that day brings another kind of encounter. There the travelers meet Americans they already know, including Lita Vietor, who had been kind to them in San Francisco, as well as people from Palm Beach who are on a tour. A stop at an I. M. Pei hotel adds photography to the day’s itinerary. These details locate the visit among overlapping groups of travelers and scheduled attractions, without turning the city into a generalized portrait.

At a commune, children come out to sing God Bless America and Jingle Bells for arriving visitors. The narrator is distressed by the performance and by the repetition he observes: another busload arrives, and the children repeat the same routine and embrace the visitors. His response shifts the diary away from sightseeing toward the conditions of being looked at and welcomed on a tour. What might otherwise appear as a cheerful stop becomes, in his account, a troubling performance staged again and again for passing groups. The scene is distinctive because it records both the children’s public role and the narrator’s discomfort with the visitors’ place in that repeated exchange.

The hotel and the departure

The hotel offers little relief from the itinerary. The November 1 entry says the narrator went to bed fully dressed and describes the place as infested. That brief detail contrasts with the grandeur of the day’s destinations: the city’s most imposing sights are followed by an uncomfortable night in a room that the diary remembers chiefly for its condition. The entry does not elaborate, but the juxtaposition makes the hotel part of the account rather than a neutral pause between excursions.

On November 4, the travelers leave the hotel for an 8:45 flight, have tea, and then spend hours at the airport. The diary notes that tipping is not permitted and that cigarettes are what people actually want, a practical observation about the visitors’ effort to understand local expectations. The delay acquires a human focus when an elderly woman and her husband discover that her passport is missing. They search for an hour and a half; two minutes before the plane is ready to leave, she finds it in her pocket. The narrator describes the episode as movie-like and feels sympathy for the couple. Beijing’s final scene is thus not another landmark but a near-departure crisis resolved at the last moment. The flight toward Hong Kong closes this brief record with the diary’s attention moving from the planned itinerary to the contingencies of travel.