Six in the morning is the real show

Most visitors come to the Temple of Heaven to photograph the Hall of Prayer for Good Harvests and then leave. That is a mistake, and an expensive one, because the park ticket costs 15 yuan and the building you came for takes about eleven minutes to look at properly. The part worth the trip starts before seven.

The gates open around six. By twenty past, the long covered corridor on the east side is full. Half of the crowd is dancing, and the other half is playing a card game that has clearly been running since the Ming dynasty. There is a man doing calligraphy with a sponge brush and a bucket of water on the paving stones. The characters evaporate in about four minutes, which he seems to find genuinely funny.

What you will actually see

The activity sorts itself into rough zones:

• Tai chi and sword practice, on the raised stone terraces south of the main hall
• Ballroom dancing with a portable speaker, near the east gate
• Karaoke, occasionally at a volume that would get you arrested in Munich
• Badminton with no net, in whatever space is left over
• Shuttlecock kicking, which looks easy until you try it

The average age is somewhere north of sixty-five. Nobody is performing for tourists. That is exactly the point.

Getting in, and what it costs

The park has four gates. The east gate is closest to the dance groups and easiest to reach: Tiantan Dongmen station on Line 5 drops you almost at the entrance. The south gate is the ceremonial one most guided tours use.

• Park-only ticket: 15 yuan in peak season, 10 yuan in low season
• Through ticket, which adds the Hall of Prayer, the Circular Mound Altar and the Echo Wall: 34 yuan peak, 28 yuan low
• Park open roughly 6am to 10pm in summer. The inner halls close around 5.30pm.

You need your passport for almost every ticket and every entry point in China now. Bring it, along with whichever phone you used to make any booking.

The architecture, briefly, so it means something

The Hall of Prayer for Good Harvests is a round, triple-eaved hall built entirely of wood, without nails, sitting on a three-tiered marble terrace. It burned down in 1889 after a lightning strike and was rebuilt using salvaged timber.

The numbers are the interesting part. The four inner pillars stand for the seasons. The twelve middle ones are the months, and the twelve outer ones are the traditional two-hour segments of a day. Twenty-eight pillars, and the whole calendar is in there. Once someone explains that, the building stops being a photo stop.

The Echo Wall is over at the Imperial Vault of Heaven. Two people stand at opposite ends and speak in an ordinary voice. It works, more or less, and it works best when the wall is empty, which by nine in the morning it will not be.

How not to be that tourist

Do not walk through the middle of a dance formation to get a better angle. Do not film people's faces up close without asking. If somebody waves you into the shuttlecock circle, go in. You will be terrible and they will be delighted, and that exchange is worth more than any photograph you will take all week.

Elderly Chinese are remarkably tolerant of foreigners making an effort, and remarkably unimpressed by foreigners standing at the edge holding a camera.

Afterwards

Leave by the north gate and you are on the edge of the old Dongcheng grid. There is decent jianbing and hot soy milk within three blocks, and the lanes between the park and Qianmen are still quiet at that hour. I usually spend two hours inside the park and then eat breakfast twice.

Practical notes

• Best months: late September to early November, and April. In July the heat is unpleasant by half past eight.
• Bring water. The stalls inside are sparse before eight.
• Weekday mornings are noticeably calmer than weekends.
• For photographs, the early sun comes from the east, so the Hall of Prayer is front-lit at dawn and backlit later on.
• Wear shoes you can slip off, in case you get invited onto a mat.

If you have a spare hour, walk south to the Circular Mound Altar, where the emperors made their sacrifices. It is a bare circular platform of nine concentric rings and almost nobody is there before nine. It is the quietest place in a city of twenty-two million people.

Originally published on 71Asia Tours blog.