Near the noon of May 13, our flight landed at Beijing Captial Airport; that was the second time I went there in eleven years. The long taxiing time to the bridge started to make me sense the sea change of a city in a decade.  When the aircraft finally reached one of the gates in Teminal 3 and we passed the immigration check, I thought the next thing to do was to claim my luggage downstairs, but I was wrong. The passengers have to take a light-rail express, cruising as long as at least the distance of two MRT stations in Taipei, to the baggage claim. When we arrived the carousel,
bags were already there.  Huge, clean, bright and streamlined, no wonder Time Magazine chose the Terminal 3 as one of two best terminals in the world( the other one is London Heathlow’s Terminal 5).

The connecting express tram within the Airport will take you to a transit spot in downtown, from where you can make a city tour to almost every attraction via subway lines: Forbidden Palace, Summer Palace, Yuanmingyuan, Celestial Temple, Olympic Park etc,, you just name it. As for the sightseeing spots on the outskirts of Beijing, e.g. Great Wall, Marco Polo Bridge, temples and pagodas, you have to manage somehow getting to these places. Reports said Beijing had demolished too many old residences for the expansion of a modern city and thus lost its "old Beijing" flavor; but I think it preserved the antiques of its own pretty well. Within the old buildings and hutungs(residential alleys), I’ve
found two places are worthy of visiting: The Memorial Hall of
Neo-cultural Movement on the tree-clad May-Fourth Avenue and The Memorial Residence of late Madam Sun near a long, beautiful inner river decorated with weeping willows(什剎海).

Despite boasting of convenient subway systems and two-decked or
two-cabined public buses, Beijing still has a serious problem of congestion: bustling streets, hustling people and even intractable
gridlock everyday.  Drivers are less "civilized" in yeilding the right of way to pedestrains at every intersection. I think it’s kind of ineluctable, knotty problem for the populous cities like Beijing, Shanghai or even a second-tier city of XI’an, my next stop.

Xi’an, a mini Chang-an, was the capital of various dynasties since Tang a thousand years ago. It is said the city wall of Xi’an, re-built in Ming Dynasty with a perimeter of 13k, is the best one in the world, remains basically intact. But it is only one eighth in length to the ancient Chang-an. So you could image how strong and affluent the Tang Dynasty was then while the contemporary Europe had been in Dark Age.  Due to its remoteness in time, the rich cultural heritage, such as pagodas, temples, mausoleums etc. were refurbished or remained status quo.  By the advance
of archaeological techniques, I believe someday they will be excavated just like the amazing Cotta-terra Warriors and Horses. One of the heritage sites impressed me most is "Forest of Inscribed Steles"(碑林). The recondite articles and the calligraphy on the stones made me feel likean illiterate.  Not far from 碑林 locates the memorial hall of "Xi’an Mutiny Incident", demonstrates the history everyone should get to know.

Merely eleven years ago when I first returned to Mainland China at
Beijing, I noticed that most people seemed in gloom and doom, but this time I saw so many sanguine faces on the streets, in the subway cabins.  Like I’ve said before, it’s a matter of time; in short, a matter of industrization or not. Pretty soon we’ll see a later-day Han/Tang emerging in China.