A Trip to the Beijing Planetarium

The metal sculpture looked like a squashed foil-wrapped baked potato blown up to the size of a sleeping beagle. But there it stood on a pedestal inside the Long March Space gallery in Beijing’s Dashanzi contemporary art district.
One of the images in the accompanying photo-collage depicted the sculpture in front of a forest of model rockets. Another picture showed a homely black stone that must have been the inspiration for the sculpture. I bent down to read the English language information on the label aloud: “New Plan to Fill the Sky, by Zhan Wang, 2002.”

“The sky here is already full,” I said sidelong to my husband, “with late spring smog.” During our few days in Beijing, the view from our 26th floor hotel room had never changed: a milky mist that obliterated even the silhouettes of buildings half a mile away.

But whatever the connection between Wang’s metal rock art and the sky, I wasn’t going to figure it out then. The young woman seated near the front door hadn’t even looked up when we’d entered the gallery. Unable to speak Chinese, I wasn’t about to disturb her. So I snapped a couple of quick photos and left, assuming that it was just one more piece of modern art that I didn’t get. Little did I know.

Forgetting about the mysterious lump, the next day I waded through the murkiest atmosphere I’d ever breathed to visit the Beijing Planetarium. The architecture alone was worth the trip. The transparent box of the new building glistened like a gem in contrast to the matte grey dome of the original 1957 planetarium, which still stood in front. The glass façade curved seamlessly in to a half-elliptical entrance, somewhat like a space-age version of an arched gothic doorway from Notre Dame Cathedral.

Inside, exhibits on the sun and planets peppered the floor around the foot of a massive sphere, which housed a digital space theater. I opted for the neighboring 4D theater.
Blasted by the Big Bang and sprayed by imaginary saber-toothed tiger spit, I emerged from a side exit to a corner of the grounds behind the old planetarium. To my left stood a small observatory. To my right was a bed of open-blossomed Chinese roses - Beijing’s city flower. And between them, on a large granite pedestal, sat a lumpy reddish black rock.

Instantly I recognized that deflated avocado form from the photo next to the Zhan Wang sculpture. And thus I was inspired to learn the remarkable story of the Nandan meteorites – the astronomical and mythological muse for Wang’s modern art.

In 1958, China’s Communist government pushed for rapid industrialization according to the Second Five Year Plan, better known as the Great Leap Forward. They decided that the nation’s steel production needed to be doubled within one year. To meet that ambitious target, workers melted down any and all scrap metal containing iron that they could scrounge up - even cooking pots went into the furnaces.

Farmers in Nandan county of southern China’s Guangxi province must have felt relieved, though. Not only would they get to keep their woks, but they would also finally have a means to discard all those heavy rusting stones that had been slowing down their plows for generations. But the smelters couldn’t melt the iron-rich stones, even at the highest temperatures.

Geologists went to Nandan to investigate. There they found local records of an unusual celestial event that occurred some 450 years earlier. The description seemed to match the present day pattern of bizarre stones strewn across the fields: “Stars fell from the northwest direction, five to six fold long, waving like snakes and dragons. They were as bright as lightning and disappeared in seconds.” Finding the stones to have an unusual composition of 92% iron and 7% nickel, the experts concluded that they had come from a meteorite that weighed more than 9500 kg before impact.
Modern science sees meteorite falls as natural phenomena, of course, but old Chinese folklore has another take. As artist Zhan Wang relates, the creator-goddess used stones to patch up the sky after a monster knocked its head against the mountain holding it up, which caused a portion to fall. Later folk stories revolve around a fear of the sky falling - think Chicken Little - and so Wang conceived “New Plan to Fill the Sky.” In his project, a hollow stainless steel replica of the Beijing Planetarium’s chunk of meteorite would be launched into space someday, using a modern satellite to help patch the sky just as the creator-goddess did to restore balance to the universe.

Until Zhan Wang’s vision is realized, though, the Beijing smog will probably keep holding the sky up well enough.

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How to get there:

The Beijing Planetarium is located on the western side of the city, not far from the city zoo. A taxi is the easiest way to get there and shouldn’t cost more than 30 RMB from centrally located hotels (about $2.50, at 8 RMB to the dollar), but environmentally conscious visitors might also consider taking the Beijing Subway’s Loop Line to Xizhimen station on its western side and walking for about ten to fifteen minutes due west. (If you can figure out the buses, more power to you.)

Address: No. 138 Xizhimenwai Avenue of Beijing (about halfway between the 2nd and 3rd Ring Roads).

What to do:

Wandering around the planetarium grounds is free, including viewing the Nandan meteorite. Admission to the shows and exhibits is a la carte, ranging in price from 15 RMB for an exhibit on the Chinese space program in the old building to 45 RMB for the SGI Digital Space theater show - signs at the ticket booth are in English. No English on exhibit labels, but the body language of kids delighted at learning how the universe works needs no translation.

Some English language information can be found at the planetarium’s website at http://www.bjp.org.cn/en/index.htm.