It snowed the day we drove from Beijing to visit the Great Wall. Can you see the tower at the top of the hill? That's where we climbed. None of the steps are even, and they were covered with ice. Our terrific guide Shine (He asked us to call him that. It was as close as Westerners could come to pronouncing his name.) pulled and pushed us all the way up and all the way down. What an amazing view at the top! We imagined we were soldiers in the days of the Ming Dynasty, standing at the top of the Wall, watching for invaders from the North.

H ere we are at the entrance to the Forbidden City in Beijing. Here is where the Chinese emperors lived. The complex is enormous. We've seen Windsor Castle in England, the Kremlin in Moscow, and the Imperial Palace in Tokyo. They could all fit inside the Forbidden City, which was built fifty years before Columbus set sail for America. Our textbooks give us only the barest picture of the magnificence of Chinese civilization. Thanks to our guide, Shine, we learned and saw so much. We didn't even mind the rain!

We came upon this beautiful bridge in a temple garden in the city of Hangzhou, which is not far from Shanghai. Hangzhou is famous for its gardens. It was raining too hard for us to spend much time in the gardens. Instead, we went to the temples which were crowded with people offering prayers and burning incense to the gods. Some of the incense sticks were the size of baseball bats! The traditional religions of Buddhism and Taoism appear to be thriving in China, even after fifty years of Communist rule. Hangzhou was Marco Polo's favorite city. We must have been strolling in his footsteps when we walked along the Grand Canal and visited centuries-old temples.