Niujie Mosque

Prayer Hall
We took advantage of the holiday-reduced traffic to cycle to the south west part of Beijing. One goal was the Niujie Mosque (Ox Street Mosque), which is the largest mosque in Beijing, and dates back to the fourteenth century. At first the mosque appears to be a typical chinese temple, but then some more mosque-like features become obvious, such as arabic characters and the dome on the roof, although this too is surrounded by the usual guardian animal carvings.


Roof Decorations and Arabic Characters


Dome and Guardian Animals
The door to the minaret was open, and people seemed to be looking around, so I climbed up to the top to get a view of the courtyard. When I returned back down I found I was locked in. Someone soon discovered me, and went to fetch a key. Everyone thought it was a good joke!


Minaret Ceiling


Mosque Courtyard from Minaret
Apparently a few years ago the mosque was surrounded by a Muslim enclave with open air markets and stalls selling tasty Muslim food. Now it is in a rather charmless neighborhood of tall apartment buildings. There did seem to be a large number of butchers selling very fresh lamb (to judge by the smell and the discarded lamb pelt on the sidewalk), and some nice little stores selling snacks and other things. We had delicious beef dumplings standing on the sidewalk, and then waited for the egg and vegetable dumplings to cook, "chatting" with the owners about the tandem.


Old and New


Butcher's Shop


Meat Transporter


Solemn Child


Spot the Tandem
We next cycled east across town to a a place near the Temple of Heaven marked on the map as a Pearl Market and a Silk Market. We left our tandem in the guarded bike area, just outside the Pearl Market, and wandered around there - not that we wanted any pearls. The market is a building five storeys high. On the fourth and fifth floors are numerous small shops selling pearls, and other jewelry that we thought was quite ugly, and a few stores selling jade and other art. On lower floors are selections of souvenirs, and then clothes and shoes, and finally in the basement a bustling fish market selling every sort of sea life you could imagine. This meant that the fine jewelry stores on the top floors are permeated by a faint smell of old fish - maybe not too inappropriate for pearls!


Temple of Heaven from Roof of the Pearl Market
After this we decided to check out something marked as the Liulichang Cultural Street on the tourist map. This is just south of Tiananmen square. It is a street of old-looking buildings, tea and antique stores, and shops selling tourist trinkets. Pedicabs pedal up and down looking for passengers - the tandem was a good defense against the usual solicitations - so it is obviously a tourist attraction, although there were few people there today. The most interesting thing we found was an art gallery of Chinese paintings, with several artists painting in quite different, but very Chinese, styles.


Art Show
The next leg was to the Friendship Store to buy a phrase book with pinyin phonetics, rather than the more common home brewed version usually found in such books. This was again on the opposite side of town. This part of the ride took us past the Forbidden City and Tiananmen Square, both very crowded with visitors. We were happy not to be sight-seeing there today.

On our way back home we stopped off for coffee and cheese-cake in the Passer-By Bar mentioned in the Lonely Planet Guide. We had passed this on a previous bike ride just after a Peking Duck lunch when we didn't need more food. It is a pleasant, hippy sort of place in a quiet courtyard that the guide book says is reminiscent of the old style Beijing homes that are disappearing as the hutong areas are modernised - a nice place to rest after our long ride.


Passer By Bar
With all our crisscrossing across the city our ride added up to twenty-five miles in all. You can find a Google map here.