At Home in Beijing

We were invited into the home of a woman who loves to entertain foreign tourists. She showed us her home, whose history is clouded in obscurity. Her family has lived in this house for hundreds of years, and their oral tradition holds that it was built for a nobleman and his family sometime around the sixteenth century. Perhaps the nobleman was a servant to the emperor. Their oral tradition may be correct since the house is in Old Beijing, a part of the city adjacent to the Imperial Complex and the Forbidden City. She and her daughter served us tea and Chinese cookies. These two women are skilled artists who created lovely oriental scenes on glass bottles. The trick is that they must use tiny little brushes which they use to paint the glass from the inside. She showed us her work and told us that she has traveled to Indonesia, Singapore and the United States showing her craft.Read more