The best free show in China: the parks at seven in the morning

If we could put one thing on every itinerary that no guidebook rates, it would be this: a city park at seven in the morning. The retirees of every Chinese city own the parks for the first three hours of the day, and what they do there, with enormous energy and no self-consciousness, is the most direct view of Chinese life a visitor gets. It costs nothing (or a few yuan at the gate of the imperial parks such as the Temple of Heaven and Jingshan), it needs no booking, and it is where our guides start more days than at any monument.

What you will see

Walk into a big park between 6.30 and 9 am and you will find, in different corners, most of the following:

• Tai chi in groups of twenty following a leader, slow and silent, often with a portable speaker playing a two-stringed erhu.
• Sword and fan forms, the same discipline with a prop; the fans snap open in unison and it is startlingly beautiful.
• Ballroom dancing: waltz, tango and cha-cha on a paved square, couples in their seventies dancing properly, a speaker on a lamppost.
• Square dancing (guangchang wu): lines of women doing choreographed routines to pop songs, the national pastime of the retired, slightly controversial for its volume.
• Choirs of fifty singing revolutionary songs and folk songs from sheet music, with a conductor and an accordion.
• Water calligraphy: men writing classical poems on the paving with a giant brush dipped in water, the characters evaporating as they finish.
• Birds in cages hung in the trees by their owners, who sit beneath and compare songs; a particular corner of Lu Xun Park and the Temple of Heaven.
• Card games, Chinese chess and mahjong at stone tables, with an audience.
• Exercise equipment in bright colours, used with gusto by people who look too old for it.
• Kites, hacky sack (jianzi), whip-cracking, walking backwards, slapping trees, and the man who hangs from a branch by his neck, who exists in every park.
• Opera practice: a singer and an erhu player under a pavilion, the singer often a retired professional.
• The marriage market, on weekend mornings in Shanghai’s People’s Park: parents advertising their unmarried children on umbrellas and sheets of paper (age, height, salary, apartment ownership) and negotiating with other parents. Look, do not photograph faces.

Which parks

• Shanghai: Fuxing Park in the French Concession is the classic, compact and intense, with dancers by the fountain and tai chi on the lawns; People’s Park for the marriage market on Saturdays and Sundays; Lu Xun Park in Hongkou for the birds and the choirs; Xiangyang Park and Zhongshan Park for smaller, neighbourhood versions; the Bund promenade itself at dawn for kite-flyers and tai chi with the skyline behind.
• Beijing: the Temple of Heaven park, the greatest of them all, acres of retirees from 6 am in the corridors and under the cypresses; Jingshan Park for the choirs on the hill; Beihai Park for water calligraphy and dancers by the lake; Ritan Park near the embassies; Ditan Park for its temple fair at New Year.
• Suzhou: the gardens open later, but the Shilu canal-side walks and the park around the Pan Gate have the morning crowd.
• Hangzhou: the West Lake shores, especially around the Bai Causeway and Solitary Hill, where the tai chi has the lake as a backdrop.
• Everywhere else: any park with a lake. The ritual is national.

When, and how long

Six-thirty to nine. By ten the retirees have gone home for lunch preparations and the park is a park. An hour is plenty; ninety minutes with a guide explaining who everyone is and what the songs are about is better. It fits before the sights, which in any case open at 8.30 or 9, and it fits the jet-lagged, who are awake anyway.

Joining in

You will be invited. The tai chi groups wave newcomers into the back row; the dancers will take a foreign partner for a waltz with delight; the badminton players hand over a racquet; the calligrapher offers the brush. Accept. Nobody expects skill, everybody enjoys the attempt, and a visitor doing bad tai chi in a Shanghai park at seven in the morning is more welcome than any tourist at any monument. Children are passed around and admired; teenagers are embarrassed and then, usually, dance.

Etiquette

• Photographs: of the scene, freely; of individual faces, ask with a gesture first, and never at the marriage market or of anyone who turns away.
• Noise: the park is theirs; do not talk over the choir or walk through the tai chi lines.
• The equipment is for everyone; take a turn and give it back.
• Dress for walking; nobody dresses up.
• Money: nothing is for sale and nobody wants anything from you except, occasionally, to practise English.

Breakfast afterwards

The park empties toward the breakfast stalls at its gates: jianbing from a griddle, soy milk and fried dough sticks, steamed buns, a bowl of noodles or congee, eaten standing or on a plastic stool for a dollar or two. This is the best breakfast in China and the food guide lists the dishes. A guide takes you to the right stall and orders; alone, point and smile and pay with Alipay. Then the Forbidden City, or Yu Garden, or the day’s first meeting, already feeling like someone who lives there.

For whom

Everyone, but especially: older travellers, who find their contemporaries and are often moved by the energy (the elderly parents guide builds mornings around parks for exactly this reason); families, whose children get adopted for an hour; and business travellers, for whom it is the one thing in Shanghai that cannot be seen from a taxi. Our day guide bookings can start at seven; on the tours, the park morning is on the itinerary in every city, and it is the one guests write to us about afterwards.