Beijing Read online

  BEIJING

  Cityscopes are concise, illustrated guides that provide an overview of a city’s past as well as a focused eye on its present. Written by authors with unique and intimate knowledge of the cities, each book features a chronological history to the present day. Also including a section of essays on key places or aspects of the city today – from museums to music, public transport to parks, food to fashion – the books offer fascinating vignettes on the quintessential and the quirky, as well as listings of key sites and venues with the authors’ own commentaries. Illustrated throughout with contemporary photos and compelling historical images, Cityscopes are essential companions to cities worldwide.

  Titles in the series:

  Beijing Linda Jaivin

  Buenos Aires Jason Wilson

  cityscopes

  BEIJING

  Linda Jaivin

  REAKTION BOOKS

  Published by Reaktion Books Ltd

  33 Great Sutton Street

  London EC1V 0DX, UK

  www.reaktionbooks.co.uk

  First published 2014

  Copyright © Linda Jaivin 2014

  The writing and production of this book was greatly assisted by Australian National University professor Geremie R. Barmé and his Australian Research Council Federation Fellowship ‘Beijing: China’s Heritage and the City as Spectacle’

  All rights reserved

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers

  Page references in the Photo Acknowledgments and

  Index match the printed edition of this book.

  Printed and bound in Hong Kong

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  eISBN: 9781780233000

  OPENING IMAGES: pp. 6–7: the Forbidden City moat in snow; p. 8 top: hutong tour by the lakes at Shichahai; p. 8 bottom: Tiananmen Square during the National Day Holiday; p. 9 top: changing of the guards, including plain-clothes police, at Tiananmen; p. 9 bottom: backstage at the Peking Opera; pp. 10–11: Tiananmen Square, view from Tiananmen Gate. At the right is the Great Hall of the People, in the right foreground is the winged column known as a huabiao, in the centre background the Monument to the People’s Heroes and, behind that, the Mao Mausoleum; p. 12: the CCTV Headquarters; p. 13: Chinese New Year temple fair lanterns, early 2014, the Year of the Horse; pp. 14–15: artist Xu Bing’s Phoenix, built from materials collected from construction sites in Beijing between 2008 and 2010; pp. 16–17: the Forbidden City.

  CONTENTS

  Prologue

  HISTORY

  1 Wild Years

  2 Khanbalik

  3 The Ming Dynasty (1368–1644)

  4 The Qing Dynasty (1644–1911)

  5 The Republic, Japanese Occupation and Civil War (1912–1949)

  6 Revolution (1949–1976)

  7 Reform: The First Decades (1976–2007)

  8 Ringing in the New

  THE CITY TODAY

  In the Shadow of the Drum Tower

  The Dragon’s Vein

  ‘Chinese Town’

  The Circle Line

  The Thirsty City

  On the Art Trail

  The Nest, the Cube, the Underpants and the Egg

  A Taste of the City

  The Prince’s Garden

  LISTINGS

  Chronology

  References

  Suggested Reading and Viewing

  Acknowledgements

  Photo Acknowledgements

  Index

  The Back Lake at Shichahai.

  Prologue

  Peking is a jewel city, a jewel city such as the eyes of man have not seen before. It is a jewel city of golden and purple and royal blue roofs, of palaces and pavilions and lakes and parks and princes’ gardens. It is a jewel set with the purple sides of Western Hills and the blue girdle of the Jade Fountain stream and centuries-old cedars . . . In the city are nine parks and three imperial lakes, known as the ‘Three Seas’, now thrown open to the public. And Peking has such a blue sky and such a beautiful moon, such rainy Summers, such cool, crisp Autumns, and such dry, clear Winters! . . . It has colour – colour of the old and colour of the new. It has the colour of imperial grandeur, of historic age and of Mongolian plains . . . It has miles upon miles of city walls, forty or fifty feet broad at the gates. It has gate towers and drum towers, which announce the evenings for the residents. It has temples, old gardens, and pagodas, where every stone and every tree and every bridge have a history and a legend.

  The great bilingual writer Lin Yutang wrote that in the 1930s, in his essay ‘Captive Peking’. Today, the jewel sparkles less brightly. On the city’s many bad air days, the pollution is so thick it can blur the edges of the buildings across the street, never mind the Western Hills. Beijing’s imperial grandeur can be equally hard to summon. Its denuded palaces and temples and other historic monuments are dwarfed by high-rise developments that have nothing to say about its historic age and which have swept outwards over the Mongolian plains like a tide of cement, tile and glass. Its famous walls have given way to subway tracks and highways, its legendary gate towers are mostly remembered in the names of train stations. Evening is announced not by bells and drums but the glow of neon and the tightening gridlock of the city’s infernal traffic.

  And yet every so often, a beautiful blue breaks out in the sky like a miracle and the palace roofs and lakes sparkle, or fresh snow falls, and everything looks clean and magical. Within the remaining courtyard gardens, peach and crab apple trees still bloom in spring and the branches of the pomegranate and persimmon trees hang heavy with fruit in the autumn. You can still buy roast chestnuts and sweet potatoes from street pedlars as the days grow cold and short, and sour plum juice on long summer days to keep the heat at bay.

  In Beijing, if you know what you are looking and listening for, you can read history in private doorways and hear its echoes in public parks. Drink coffee at Ritan Park and you walk where the emperor once performed rituals at the Altar to the Sun; wander the aisles at Walmart in Caishikou and you are crossing the old execution ground. The most careless urban development – and urban development has rarely been more careless than in Beijing – can’t obliterate the legacy of the city’s 3,000 years of history, or the five dynasties that made Beijing their capital. And so this tough, beleaguered city continues to enrapture and enthral those for whom its richer, bigger, more seductive rival Shanghai appears but a glamorous parvenu.

  The people of Beijing have seen it all – cycles of prosperity and decay, wise rule and corruption, order and chaos. They’ve been treated to the greatest of grand spectacles, from imperial processions to Red Guard rallies and Communist Party congresses. Proximity to power has brought some citizens wealth and others grief, some wealth and then grief. Its history is soaked in blood as well as glory.

  Nomads – Mongols, Manchus and others – frequently raided Beijing from the Great Walls meant to keep them out. For centuries they ruled it as well, bequeathing to Beijing a hybrid culture and an archetypal personality that is perhaps rougher-and-readier than that of many other parts of China, yet which is also urbane, dignified, big-hearted, witty and playful.

  The intoxicating Beijing dialect reflects this in its inborn courtesies, its unique burr, its wit and pace. The language of Beijing, to quote the writer Liu Yong, ‘always seems spoken in the carefree, leisurely manner of one who is enjoying a cup of green tea in the warm sunshine of a late autumn afternoon’. (On the subject of language, ‘Beijing’ is what became of ‘Peking’ after 1979 when the Communists made pinyin the standard romanization system for the spelling of Chinese names.)<
br />
  Beijing shares a latitude (39º54´N) with Philadelphia in the U.S. and Toledo in Spain. It’s a northern city with northern habits. Its people have a taste for mutton, yoghurt and wheat (steamed and fried breads, noodles and dumplings) as well as fierce grain spirits, all of which come together in the typical winter meal of mutton hotpot accompanied by sesame buns and shots of potent erguotou.

  Beijing’s four seasons are distinct and in harmony with the divisions of the Chinese lunar calendar. Neglect the advice of the traditional almanac to switch to winter hats on a particular day and you’ll have cold ears. Winter nights may well dip below −10°C and summers can be stifling, with the mercury climbing into the high 30s. Spring brings not just rain but epic sandstorms, and autumn delivers just the sort of delicious, green-tea weather described by Liu Yong.

  Beijing has been the home, native or adopted, of many of China’s most famous and influential artists, thinkers and writers, including Cao Xueqin, whose Dream of the Red Chamber is widely acknowledged to be the greatest novel in the Chinese language; the early twentieth-century literary giant Lu Xun; and even the 2010 Nobel Peace Laureate, the imprisoned dissident Liu Xiaobo. It’s been both the citadel of state power and the crucible of iconoclasm in China.

  China has no time zones: Beijing time is China time. Beijing has often represented China both to itself and to the world. During the Republican period, 1912–49, China’s emblem was the imperial Temple of Heaven; today it is the Gate of Heavenly Peace (Tiananmen) and the Great Wall. Even its tragedies are emblematic. The burning by French and English troops in 1860 of the imperial garden palace, the Yuanmingyuan, remains the single most searing symbol of a century and a half of humiliation and exploitation by Western (and later Japanese) imperial powers in the Chinese national imagination. Marco Polo’s awestruck descriptions of ‘Cambulac’ (Beijing), photos of Nixon on the Great Wall, the Tiananmen protests of 1989 and the opening ceremony of the 2008 Olympics have all helped to shape the image of China to the world outside its borders. Although the great diversity of China could not possibly be contained in any one city or village, Beijing’s story is in many ways that of China itself.

  Winter in the hutong near the lakes of Shichahai.

  Nanluoguxiang in winter.

  HISTORY

  1 Wild Years

  In the lower basement of the Malls at Oriental Plaza in Beijing’s bustling shopping centre of Wangfujing, beneath the designer shops and below the Wonderful Food Court, sits a pocket-sized museum. At its centre is a fenced-off square of packed earth. Cooking fires lit 24,000 years ago have left scorch marks on the ground; discarded animal bones lie alongside abandoned stone tools. In the first years of the new millennium, workers excavating the plaza’s foundations discovered the Stone Age site. After archaeologists surveyed the rare finds, the mall’s developers agreed to preserve a tiny part of what became a substantial dig. The Wangfujing Palaeolithic Museum is a reminder that people have been coming to this area to hunt and gather from the Stone Age through to the Plastic Age.

  At the time those cooking fires were lit, the Yellow River flowed closer to the place we call Beijing than it does today. That patch of ancient dust was once part of a fertile alluvial plain roamed by wild pigs, buffalo, sheep and deer. The rivers and streams teemed with fish, turtles and beavers. Grass, wildflowers and trees laden with nuts and fruit scented the bright, clear air. This was the world of the early humans descended from the hominids known as Peking Man, Sinanthropus pekinensis, who may have been around as long as 780,000 years ago.

  Peking Man rewrote evolutionary history in the 1920s when a Swedish geologist discovered hominid teeth at Zhoukoudian’s Dragon Bone Mountain in Fangshan county, 42 km southwest of the capital. Chinese and foreign archaeologists soon found more teeth as well as bones, skulls, skull fragments and tools. As they put the pieces of the puzzle together, the scientists discovered that these hominids had a similar skeletal structure to our own and a bigger brain than either Java Man or South Africa’s Homo habilis. They lived in communal caves in the mountains for protection from the sabre-toothed cats, wolves, panthers and bears that also thrived in this rich environment, venturing occasionally on to the plains to hunt.

  Hunting and gathering the old way: a mural in the Wangfujing Paleolithic Museum.

  Scientists were still excavating at Zhoukoudian in 1937 when the Japanese invaded from the north, crossing the nearby Marco Polo Bridge. Forced to abandon the dig, the team, led by the Jewish German-American anthropologist Franz Weidenreich, retreated to a lab at the Peking Union Medical College to study their finds. By then they had collected tens of thousands of tools as well as skull and bone fragments from almost 40 individuals of both sexes, including adolescents and one who had lived past fifty. In 1941, with the United States poised to enter the Second World War, Weidenreich needed to return to America. He instructed his colleagues to make replicas of all of the fragments and send them to him in the U.S. The remains themselves were to be crated for shipment out of Japanese-occupied Beijing.

  In the confusion of wartime, Peking Man went AWOL. Was the disappearance the result of bumbling on the part of the U.S. Marines to whom the crates were entrusted? Did conniving Japanese scientists steal the relics? Were they buried under a garage at the American Embassy? Hidden in the Taklamakan Desert, as posited in Nicole Mones’s novel Lost in Translation? Secretly sold to an American collector? Do they sit, as one rumour has it, on the mantelpiece of an elderly Chinese revolutionary? All that remains are the replicas, the theories, and enough mystery to fuel the mad fires of creationists who claim that the fact that no one can produce the actual relics is proof that the whole business, and the theory of evolution itself, is a hoax. If any reader knows the truth, please contact the Fangshan county government, which is offering a reward for the return of its natives.

  Later excavations at Zhoukoudian (now a UNESCO World Heritage site) turned up evidence of an even older hominid, nicknamed ‘Mountaintop Caveman’, and other, post-Peking Man hominids as well. For the record, none bear the slightest resemblance to the oversized gorilla with a soft spot for a leopard-swinging blonde that stars in the cultish Hong Kong film The Mighty Peking Man (1977). They had more in common with the blonde: they too wore animal skins and jewellery fashioned from bones and shells. By the Neolithic age these early humans began settling on the plains, where they cultivated grain (probably millet – a staple of Beijing home cooking to this day), domesticated animals and coaxed clay into pottery.

  Entrance to the Peking Man Museum at Zhoukoudian.

  Chinese history formally kicks off around 2700 BCE with the appearance of the quasi-mythical Yellow Emperor. This legendary ‘great ancestor’ of the Chinese people waged fierce battles against his rivals (who included horned demons and giants) to become the first ruler of a dominion not yet called China. These supernatural battles, in which floods and drought were part of the combatants’ arsenal, may have been fought on the site of today’s Beijing. As the accounts were recorded several millennia later, we can’t know for sure.

  Historical ground firms under the Shang dynasty, which began around 1600 BCE. The Shang claimed a subordinate state called Yan (meaning swallow, as in the bird), in the general vicinity of today’s Beijing. Yan was famed for its wild fruits and berries as well as for supplying the Shang rulers with white horses and good wives. The state of Zhou conquered the Shang in approximately 1000 BCE. Zhou organized its kingdom into fiefdoms: the one they called Northern Yan was right where it all started with Peking Man, in today’s Fangshan county.

  Close by was a small walled city called Ji, named after a type of thistle. Ji was urban Beijing’s first true ancestor. In a canal-side park by today’s Guang’anmen overpass in the city’s southwest, a small monument commemorates over 3,000 years of continuous history as a city (or a progression of cities) on that spot. Yan eventually annexed Ji to become one of the dominant Warring States of the tumultuous Eastern Zhou period (722–221 BCE).

  Ji flourish
ed within Yan, becoming one of the most celebrated cities of the era. On market days, farmers brought in live chickens, sheep, pigs and produce from their iron-ploughed fields. Nomadic tribesmen from across the Yanshan Mountains to the north, the ancestors of today’s Mongols and Manchus, galloped into town to trade horses and carpets for grain, salt, dates, pottery, meat and cloth. They also introduced stringed instruments and musical traditions that the locals blended with their own.

  Yet corruption and nepotism nipped at the heels of prosperity. The annals of Yan celebrate good King Zhao, who was so determined to stem the rot that he had miscreants disembowelled or cut in half. He built a magnificent Golden Tower east of the city to celebrate a great teacher and welcome more upright men to his kingdom. Yan grew strong once more. King Zhao’s well-fed army, high in morale, fought many a successful campaign against Yan’s rivals.

  After King Zhao’s death, standards slipped. Officials imposed heavy taxes on the people to support an army that they no longer fed so well, while feasting grandly themselves. When Yan suffered a string of military defeats, the nomadic tribes of the north, sniffing weakness, stopped trading and began raiding. Even the 650 km of fortifications that Yan hastily threw up along its northern border – among the earliest of what should properly be called China’s ‘Great Walls’ – failed to halt the pillage. In 222 BCE the rival state of Qin, based in the west, conquered Yan and seized Ji.

  The Qin ruler, the legendary tyrant Qinshihuang, became the first emperor to unify all China; his capital was in what we now call Xi’an. As Ji sat at the junction of two strategic new roads, he made it a military command centre. Qinshihuang continued the work of fortifying the northern borders, not just at Ji, but from the sea in the east all the way to Central Asia. The footprints of the Qin Great Walls – a discontinuous chain of tamped-earth walls, watchtowers, signal towers and forts – remain: I was once visiting a Beijing real estate mogul in her resort-scale weekender in the hills north of the city when she casually pointed out the remains of a Qin era Great Wall crowning a ridge on her property.